Social Trends

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Social Trends is an interdisciplinary refereed journal, published annually by the Department of Sociology, North Bengal University. All rights reserved. No part of the articles, excepting brief quotations in scholarly works, can be published/reproduced, without the written permission of the editor.

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    Empathy: A Rule of Social Relations
    (University of North Bengal, 2022-03) Roy, Sinjini
    In the social science circle, it is widely claimed that modernity and the liberal ideology have brought a high degree of individualism, social differentiation, fragmentation and atomization in societies across the globe. The neo-liberal social order makes life highly competitive and insecure and creates new social hierarchies while promoting fetishized consumption, a false sense of consumption-based happiness while adding wind to the process of atomization. The inevitable casualty of this is the erosion of the collective social spirit based on fellow-feeling and attrition of compassion or empathy for the fellow members. Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Claude Levi-Strauss and many other social scientists have lamented this turn of events and given a call for rediscovering “pity” or “empathy” in social life and social management. Many social scientists are now echoing this need of the hour while drawing support for their discourses from the Buddhist philosophy and streams of modern Western philosophy. Broadly, the discussions on empathy or compassion as a social rule encompasses the question of morality and humanism in social praxis. This paper is an attempt to understand how empathy is conceived by some philosophers and social scientists and how it works in different shades in the life of the modern middleclass people in the urban Indian context.
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    Significance of “Empathy” in social sciences
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2020) Roy, Sinjini
    Connecting to others, knowing others, and collaborating with others for making society better driven by an endless empathy for others constitute the core of social life and the essence of social science knowledge. This paper explores the significance of empathy in conceptualizing everyday life in three ways: (1) as a method to fieldwork, (2) as a method to sociological knowledge, and (3) as a method to organize and live everyday life. The central argument of the paper is that a detached approach, bereft of empathy, to sociology and life is not only impracticable but also undesirable.