This special issue of InTensions begins from the claim that the arts (or specific art forms, or artworks) have a particular capacity to facilitate just and ethical social relations. Such claims typically rest on ideas about identification – that art enables us to imagine our way into, and also to feel, something of another person’s life, and that this experience is a basis for ethical engagement across social difference. Critics call this view into question along many lines. This special issue considers expectations, rationales, tensions, and risks embedded in efforts to use the arts to foster more just social relationships. We invite submissions of art works that explore this theme, as well as scholarly articles that:

consider what gets generated through specific artworks that invite audiences to empathize/identify across gulfs in experience

unpack the political work of art or arts-informed practices that intentionally refuse, discourage, or disrupt moves to empathy/identification

attend to the contingent potential of art to unsettle normative and socially divisive affective relations

address the uneven effects/affects provoked or assumed through particular art works

flesh out historical, philosophical, or cross-cultural understandings of art’s capacity or limits to materialize new ways of relating in the world

consider that art’s power for justice is not about empathy at all, and emerges through something else entirely

Editors: Christina Sinding and Elysée Nouvet (McMaster University) in collaboration with A.C.C.E.S.S (Arts-Centered, Community-Engaged, Social Sciences Research Consortium). For further information or to submit, please email Christina Sinding or email Elysée Nouvet. Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2016.