This article critically examines how the concept of empathy is mobilized in the rhetoric of development education, and explores different ways of conceptualizing empathy as a pedagogical ideal and an affective experience. Its premise is that the concept of empathy has been insufficiently probed within academia, even though paradigm shifts in…

African knowledge remains at best on the margins, struggling for an epistemological foothold in the face of an ever dominant Western canon. At worst, African knowledge is disparaged, depreciated, and dismissed. It is often ignored even by African scholars who, having gained control of the academy in the postcolonial context, seemingly remain…