On 28 May, at TU Delft, Caroline Bollen successfully defended her PhD thesis: Empathy 2.0: What it means to be empathetic in a diverse and digital world.
In her thesis, Caroline exposes present-day problems with how we understand empathy and provide a solution: an account of empathy as a normative concept to better serve the 21st century and its social and sociotechnical challenges. The research in the dissertation highlights a fundamental and humbling notion: each other’s experience of the world is not the same for everyone, but is also not completely disconnected from it.
Caroline is the first ESDiT PhD graduate. She will continue her research within our programme as a postdoc at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
You can watch the recording of the defense here, and read the thesis here.