My interest in empathy began when I first started researching media narratives about refugees and asylum seekers, and occasionally created by them. I conducted research on these narratives in the Australian context due to Australia’s unique and brutal policies of offshore mandatory detention of all boat arrivals – despite being a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention (Laney et al, 2016). I found that in the case of most conservative media outlets in Australia, research had established that there is a tendency to dehumanise refugees. The tactics employed for such dehumanisation include visual framing, not showing individual asylum seekers and associating them with threats to border security rather than a situated humanitarian crisis (Bleiker et al, 2013). In other words, the picture of the refugee invoked by such narratives in the minds of audiences located in the Global North is one of a distant other whose shoes you cannot conceive of walking in as they are either too unfamiliar or simply invisible.

I also observed that when it came to the nation’s less ideologically conservative media outlets, editorials and features attempted to humanise refugees in order to evoke some semblance of empathy in the nonrefugee audience member. ‘Is Australia losing its empathy’ (The Guardian), ‘Australians lack empathy for plight of asylum seekers’ (Judith Ireland for The Sydney Morning Herald), ‘What happened to our compassion, Australia?’ (Mamamia.com), ‘Do we need an empathy revolution’ (TheHoopla.com) and ‘Compassion is the new radicalism’ (Indira Naidoo): these are just some of the headlines and statements that are mediated manifestations of the desired response from settlers who saw themselves as ethical and therefore sympathetic to the asylum seeker issue in Australia. Moreover, feeling empathy or compassion was established in these stories as a morally virtuous response to asylum seeker stories that may take the form of news features or creative storytelling such as film and visual art. This is not to underscore that some of these responses have led to movements within Australia and overseas that have created material differences in the lives of some asylum seekers. Examples include Kurdish writer and journalist Behrouz Boochani, who has been able to find a safe haven in New Zealand; and the #HometoBilo organisers who have been successful in their efforts to mobilise the broader Australian community in favour of the resettlement of a Tamil family of four in the rural town of Biloela.