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8 - Historical Empathy: Learning to Care about Others’ Suffering through Film

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2024

Jing Hao
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
J. R. Martin
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Summary

This chapter explores the development of empathy as a particular kind of historical sensibility that relates others’ historical experiences to interpreter’s affective semiotic processes. The chapter analyses negotiations of meaning about historical films in a university course to describe students’ affective involvement and moral engagement with the history of others. Learning about others’ history entails engaging in semiotic work to reconstruct past experiences which creates affordances for the past to become relevant in the present in axiological and affective terms. The chapter shows how through response papers and discussions about a film that depicts traumatic historical events, students display their positioning and the construction of axiological communities that connect past and present. The discourse analysis draws on the SFL concept of interpersonal meanings as construed through attitudes (Martin & White, 2005) and point of view (Unsworth, 2013) realising affective and moral orientations to others’ experience. The findings of this study offer some insights into Spanish interpersonal meaning-making resources and the potential of historical film as a tool to develop historical sensibility.

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Chapter
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The Discourse of History
A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective
, pp. 181 - 196
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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