Teaching the Politics of Encounter: Empathic Unsettlement and the Outsider within Spaces of Memory in Chile

This article focuses on encounters within spaces of traumatic memory in Chile and considers how outsiders, primarily college students, engage with narrators in these sites. The article explores the concept of empathic unsettlement, including how and whether empathic unsettlement lasts and how it moves with people. Empathic unsettlement is that middle ground between engagement and disruption, a dynamic between the narrator and the listener, that jars, that unsettles, that reframes, in a productive way, that moves one toward understanding another, while making clear that the trauma or injury of another is beyond total understanding. The article searches for connection across difference, both sensitive to trauma and suggestive of ways trauma can be opened up, harnessed toward a solidaristic politics. Memory spaces offer such possibility.