This chapter takes as a foundation that relations and understandings between people, particularly those from different social spheres, matter. Through dual lenses of critical cosmopolitanism- which posits the need for encounters based on openness, equity and caring, and transmodalities- which postulates five complexities of ‘trans’-era communications, we analyse digitally-mediated communications among groups of youth from disparate under-resourced communities as they create, share and discuss digital stories on a dedicated website. In particular, we explore exchanges between youth from a rural Ugandan village and those from a large Indian slum as they compose videos and messages intended to highlight their resourcefulness and innovation: through the entanglement of languaging, resources, materiality, culture, place and ideologies, each group mis/interprets and positions the other through a lens of ‘deficiency’. While translanguaging attends to flexibility and fluidity of language-in-use, transmodalities attends to semiotic processes through which people make sense of themselves, one another and the world. A transmodal analysis of videos, chats, interviews and group meetings recasts ‘disparity’ and ‘peripherality’, as, through transnational engagements, youths’ emergent understandings of global others’ lives and their own, and of relationships being forged, transcend labels to illuminate emic perspectives, challenging (and sometimes reifying) these constructs.

In this chapter, I clarify, contextualise, and reassess Heidegger’s ambiguous and polemical account of social cognition. Although commentators often take his critique of, for instance, empathy to be pretty straightforward, a closer look reveals that Heidegger makes a number of seemingly incoherent claims. To clarify this, I identify six different objections raised by Heidegger against theories of social cognition and then reassess who (among both historical and contemporary contenders) are, in fact, vulnerable to these objections. Drawing on Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, I then go on to develop a positive, Heideggerian account of social cognition. I show that Heidegger’s view has much in common with phenomenological empathy theories but that he departs from these by arguing that we must understand the other as exhibiting a practical comportment that constitutively depends on our shared environment. Finally, I consider how our understanding of our fellow Dasein differs from our understanding of nonhuman animals.