Compassion against justice? reflections on a time of crisis

Millions of people are currently in a state of extreme poverty, both in our country and in much of southern Europe. Unemployment and poverty (even among wage earners), worsening working conditions, children with poor diets — and all of this aggravated by a serious deterioration in health and social protection systems. Some of those social rights that we believed were strongly consolidated are now being eroded and rolled back by the course of events. A situation had seemed impossible (or which we had thought was restricted to “Third World” countries) has now unquestionably reached societies that had previously thought they were protected.
In this general context of the collapse of the Welfare State and of many of the old certainties, we need to reflect on compassion, understood as the capacity — both individual and collective — to put ourselves in others’ shoes (empathy) and to be moved by their suffering (sympathy). And not only from a generic, passive point of view but also for compassion’s ability to mobilise a whole range of practices, policies and techniques of humanitarian response to the crisis.
The Institucion Mila y Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (IMF-CSIC), in collaboration with the Residence for Researchers CSIC-Generalitat of Catalonia, will be acting (within its specific function as the research centre for Humanities of CSIC in Catalonia) as a forum for reflection and debate on a subject of great current importance, with two days of conferences that have been designed to provide a multidisciplinary, critical view of this vitally important issue, both past and present. To that end, we are pleased to announce the participation of experts in the subject and agents involved in humanitarian action on the ground, all of whom will tackle the issue from a threefold angle: the discourses of compassion, the moral and political economics of their practices, and their technologies.

14th May: 9:15 am - 7pm
15th May: 9:30 am - 6pm

Cycle: Compassion against justice? reflections on a time of crisis

Organized by: Institucion Mila y Fontanals of the Spanish National Research Council (IMF-CSIC) and Residence for Researchers