With Hyun-Joo Lim, Samantha Iwowo, Sarah Hillier & Andrew Morris
In spring 2024, a research team at Bournemouth University brought together students from radically different backgrounds: different cultures, ethnicities, sexualities, abilities, ideologies. They were asked to make short films about empathy. What emerged was both a pedagogical experiment and a philosophical inquiry.
The project identified what the paper calls the "empathy paradox": the troubling tendency of well-meaning creatives to avoid writing across difference for fear of causing offence. Left unchecked, this produces culturally isolated, homogenous art. To unlock this, the project drew on the African philosophy of Ubuntu ("I am because we are"), intersectionality theory, and participatory action research.
Student teams wrote, acted in, and filmed their own short works. What happened to their assumptions, their relationships, and their work in the process was striking: creative collaboration, structured around shared vulnerability and honest dialogue, genuinely shifted how people understood one another. Not theoretically. In practice, in the room, in the work itself.
"The empathy paradox is the tendency of otherwise well-meaning creatives to resist writing across difference to avoid causing offense. Left unchecked, this tendency can foster cultural isolationism and result in the production of sterile and homogenous art."Allies in Action, Media Practice & Education, 2025
Storytelling here is not representation. It is intervention.
When people are asked to make something together, to write a character unlike themselves, to appear on camera alongside someone whose experience is entirely different from their own, something happens that analysis alone cannot produce. They are required to actually see each other. To negotiate. To be changed by the encounter.
This is what narrative can do that argument cannot. It does not persuade people to feel differently. It creates the conditions under which they do. Stories, in this sense, are not reflections of how we relate to one another. They are tools for reshaping it.