Empathy Remotely: Compassion Without In-Person Contact

This article focuses on examining art-based research and empathy research related to health care. The article is based on two narratives produced in the project More Remotely – Work in Social and Health Care is Changing (2020–22): Carefree room project (2020–21) and Look at the Clouds webinar (2020). In this article, the former will be referred to as Narrative I and the latter as Narrative II. The narratives aim at enhancing the well-being of social and health care staff and university students, as well as their participation in changing work and study environments. Our research develops new kinds of methods for remote interaction, here called “compassion without in-person contact”. The research material and the related art-based processes define and develop a method for individual participation in remote interaction, and for understanding and articulating the subjectivity of the interaction. The research material was collected by using art-based research methods (ABR), and it is presented in this article using the abovementioned Narratives I and II as example cases with a special emphasis on visualizing emotions and empathy-based thinking. The method presented here enables ways to engage participants in building a shared understanding, aiming towards enhancing collective well-being and creating empathy-based methods in changing work environments. This article addresses the following questions: 1) How to encounter, process, and manage one’s own emotions? and 2) How to identify, share and understand the emotions of the others remotely?