The "Crisis of Pity" and the Radicalization of Solidarity: Toward Critical Pedagogies of Compassion

This article joins discussions concerning education as a means of cultivating compassion and pays explicit attention to the emotional complexities of teaching for/with compassion to help students become active and critical compassionate citizens. After reviewing the emotional aspects that establish feelings of pity and a sentimental relationship between the student as spectator and the 'other' who suffers, the article suggests that a politics of compassion is both necessary and valuable, albeit situated in practices that attend to the needs of vulnerable people and address structural inequalities. The article explores the conditions within which compassion in the classroom can be translated into protest at injustice or transmuted into action that radicalizes solidarity. For this purpose, the author proposes what he calls critical pedagogies of compassion, that is, critical pedagogies that interrogate the trappings of narratives of pity and seek to make a concrete difference in sufferers' lives. This is not a proposition for a new form of critical pedagogy, but rather a call to recognize in existing critical pedagogies the need to explicitly interrogate pity and cultivate critical compassion.