Rebeccah Nelems | Athabasca University (original) (raw)

Books by Rebeccah Nelems

Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry, 2023

Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry , 2023

Exploring Empathy: Its Propagations, Perimeters and Potentialities, 2018

While psychologists have been talking about it for decades, empathy as a topic of popular interes... more While psychologists have been talking about it for decades, empathy as a topic of popular interest has emerged relatively recently. This chapter examines the emergence of empathy as a social ‘good’ in the past decade, particularly in North America. Drawing on phenomenological and sociological theory, empathy is approached not as a singular, knowable phenomenon, but as a multi-dimensional, ethical and social construct that means different things to different people across time and place. By critically exploring common conceptions about empathy, this chapter examines what the growing interest in empathy at this moment in time might tell us about North American worldviews, beliefs and values. The chapter then considers how these worldviews and beliefs act as ‘canopies of meaning’ that may frame how people both experience and understand empathy. It is argued that the popular conception of empathy as ‘the capacity to stand in another’s shoes’ – whether conceived of in affective or cognitive terms – constitutes a ‘passive’ and individualist orientation towards the Other that divests empathy of its transformative potential. Conceived of and experienced within a worldview of interdependence and relationality, other possible orientations towards the Other appear, which open up the potential for empathy to not only transform the Self, but also to be a driver of social change. Building on Larocco’s conception of empathy as an orientation, the author proposes a diagram, which maps out how distinctive orientations towards the ‘Other’ relate to and diverge from one another.

Democratic Multiplicity: Perceiving, Enacting and Integrating Democratic Diversity, 2022

Nelems argues that today’s democratic morbidity can be located in the ways it reproduces an indiv... more Nelems argues that today’s democratic morbidity can be located in the ways it reproduces an individualist ontology to undemocratizing effects. Viewed through this lens, the growing backlashes against democracy appear as a symptom, not a cause of democracy’s crisis. However, the boundaries and enactments of representative democracies have long been troubled, stretched and shaped by democratizing processes and movements that reference an ontology of intra-being. Nelems proposes the “ecocycle” within the living ecosystems of tree canopies as a relational model of intra-being through which we might re-examine and re-imagine democratizing and undemocratizing processes. The ecocycle’s two “traps” of poverty and rigidity offer critical insights into the points of connect and disconnect between these processes, as well as the relationship between the lifeways they generate. In their porous, dynamic, entangled, and grounded relationality, tree canopies offer pathways by which the roots of a constellation of democracies might be deparochialized with a view to leveraging the transformative potential of other/wise democracies.

Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry, 2023

Active Learning for Real-World Inquiry , 2023

Exploring Empathy: Its Propagations, Perimeters and Potentialities, 2018

While psychologists have been talking about it for decades, empathy as a topic of popular interes... more While psychologists have been talking about it for decades, empathy as a topic of popular interest has emerged relatively recently. This chapter examines the emergence of empathy as a social ‘good’ in the past decade, particularly in North America. Drawing on phenomenological and sociological theory, empathy is approached not as a singular, knowable phenomenon, but as a multi-dimensional, ethical and social construct that means different things to different people across time and place. By critically exploring common conceptions about empathy, this chapter examines what the growing interest in empathy at this moment in time might tell us about North American worldviews, beliefs and values. The chapter then considers how these worldviews and beliefs act as ‘canopies of meaning’ that may frame how people both experience and understand empathy. It is argued that the popular conception of empathy as ‘the capacity to stand in another’s shoes’ – whether conceived of in affective or cognitive terms – constitutes a ‘passive’ and individualist orientation towards the Other that divests empathy of its transformative potential. Conceived of and experienced within a worldview of interdependence and relationality, other possible orientations towards the Other appear, which open up the potential for empathy to not only transform the Self, but also to be a driver of social change. Building on Larocco’s conception of empathy as an orientation, the author proposes a diagram, which maps out how distinctive orientations towards the ‘Other’ relate to and diverge from one another.

Democratic Multiplicity: Perceiving, Enacting and Integrating Democratic Diversity, 2022

Nelems argues that today’s democratic morbidity can be located in the ways it reproduces an indiv... more Nelems argues that today’s democratic morbidity can be located in the ways it reproduces an individualist ontology to undemocratizing effects. Viewed through this lens, the growing backlashes against democracy appear as a symptom, not a cause of democracy’s crisis. However, the boundaries and enactments of representative democracies have long been troubled, stretched and shaped by democratizing processes and movements that reference an ontology of intra-being. Nelems proposes the “ecocycle” within the living ecosystems of tree canopies as a relational model of intra-being through which we might re-examine and re-imagine democratizing and undemocratizing processes. The ecocycle’s two “traps” of poverty and rigidity offer critical insights into the points of connect and disconnect between these processes, as well as the relationship between the lifeways they generate. In their porous, dynamic, entangled, and grounded relationality, tree canopies offer pathways by which the roots of a constellation of democracies might be deparochialized with a view to leveraging the transformative potential of other/wise democracies.