Resisting empathy machines

As teachers and scholars working to educate the next generation of designers, engineers, service providers, and clinical staff, we care deeply about the task of ethically taking up the issues that surround and pervade disability in higher education. In our collective experience, disability has a tendency to become yet another “checkbox” (Hamraie, 2018) to be introduced, discussed, and moved on from.

Yet, as disability theorists are wont to point out, disability is a uniquely porous category. Anyone can become disabled, at any age. Indeed, our chances of becoming disabled increase tremendously as we age. In short, disability is a fact of life across the life course. This is our rationale for thinking about disability in the classroom, and insisting that design courses should account for disability, as students move beyond the classroom, and integrate themselves into their various communities of practice. Yet for us, the notion that disability is a part of life, and that students should be exposed to these concepts to be better prepared for future careers is just a starting point.

We are also concerned about how one should introduce disability concepts to students to allow the space for questions, but also for students to think deeply and complexly about disability, and how disability might affect their clients, end users, and various publics. One common means of opening up discussions about disability in higher education, as well as other learning contexts, is through the process of disability simulation. Disability simulation, for those unfamiliar, is the practice of creating artificial scenarios where able-bodied individuals imitate the experience of being disabled for a relatively short duration. For example, wearing blindfolds to simulate the experience of being blind, or putting on leg weights and compression jackets to simulate the experience of being physically disabled.

While these simulation activities often begin from the desire to foster empathy in students who may not otherwise have the experience of being disabled, simulation activities often have the unintended consequences of backfiring. That is, instead of inspiring empathy, these simulations can inspire feelings of distress, anxiety, and pity in nondisabled students. There are many reasons for this. Perhaps chief among them, disability simulations generally do not accurately reflect the experience of disability. For instance, wearing a blindfold or using VR to simulate sensory overload does not accurately reflect the everyday experiences of disabled people. Indeed, the experience of having a capacity—in the case of the blindfold example, their sense of sight—unceremoniously ripped away from them, can induce the very impulse that students may have to compartmentalize, other, or distance themselves from disabled people.

We do not mean to suggest that it is not a good thing to want to inspire more empathetic responses in our students and learners. Here, when we speak to “empathy,” we mean the capacity to imagine ourselves in the position of someone who is not us, and crucially, to use that imaginative scenario to create more inclusive practices, and to design more inclusive tools in the the so-called “real world.”

In the space that follows, we have organized some resources to help you think through the ethics and practice of simulation exercises, as well as some alternatives that you may wish to incorporate, or think about either alone, or in community with your students. As instructors, we understand that these kinds of exercises can be seductive, because they are intended to open up students to topics that they might not otherwise have considered, and they do so in often concrete, material fashion.

The resources that follow take a variety of forms, and emerge from a variety of disciplines, including engineering, rehabilitation science, the humanities, nursing and pre-medical education, psychotherapy, and more. To be clear as well, these concerns have far reaching impacts, and are not just within the purview of the academy, or higher education. Here, we have also collected a number of resources available to us via the popular press, the moving image, and social media. That is to say, there are many ways into the topic of disability simulation, because again, disability is a fact of life. As such, many people have thought about, worked through, and wrestled with the question of how to ethically introduce students and leaders of all types to disability concerns. What we present here is not meant to be an exhaustive archive, but a launching pad that can foster communication and dialogue, and to help you create the opportunity for rich conversation, and for engaging conversations either with your students, peers, or colleagues.