Empathy through Art – Testing the Limits
- Time: 24 September 2025 at 12.00–16.00
- Place: EDU’s Café, Virta building (Åkerlundinkatu 5, Tampere)
- For Tampere University personnel
- Registration by 5 September: Microsoft Forms (limited number of places)
We wish to welcome researchers at Tampere University to participate in a workshop on empathy through art. You may be from social sciences, educational sciences, humanities & cultural studies, arts research, youth research, sustainability research, urban research, as long as you are interested in using or have already used arts-based methods in your research.
This interdisciplinary workshop opens up rich terrain of arts and empathy for exploring how artistic expression can evoke, challenge, or even expand our capacity for empathy. We will discuss different dimensions of empathy and its limits whether the context is the theme of climate change education or family relations, societal debates or community building, to mention but a few. We will use arts-based methods and there is short preparatory task.
Applications: Due to the limited number of seats available in this workshop (max. 15), we would like you to express your interest in participating by 5.9.2025 here.
Participant selection: We will inform everyone whether they are accepted or not at latest on 10.9.2025. After the notification, all accepted participants are asked to inform us about dietary requirements for the coffee/tea service.
Cancellations: Let us know immediately if you are unable to participate, so we will be able to offer the position to someone else.
Preparation for the workshop: Choose and bring with you 2-3 different (on paper, small ones) images, photos or something else visual that represents your engagement with arts-based methods in research or interest in using them. (These do not have to be actual products of your research. You can choose images from magazines, internet or make one by drawing or taking a photo). We will make a collaborative art with these images, so be ready to leave them behind.
- Special guest: UNESCO chair professor Mark Brennan (Penn State Uni/US)
- Hosted by: HUMANE-CLIMATE -project (TAU), SPARG & SPECS
- Funded by: TURNS research platform’s enrichment funding (TAU)
More information: Vilhelmiina Vainikka, vilhelmiina.vainikka@tuni.fi
The event is organized by HUMANE-CLIMATE research project (Research Council of Finland, Kallio), TURNS enrichment funded project “Strengthening the Impact of Research on Climate Mobilities Education” (Vainikka), Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG, Häkli) and Spatial Socialization and Environmental Citizenship Research Collective (SPECS, Kallio).