Sociology of empathy: a map

Resumen

Over the past two decades, the “affective turn” has sparked an “empathy boom”, placing empathy at the centre of psychological, philosophical, and political debates. This article provides an overview of the growing attention devoted to empathy within contemporary sociology, outlining the main perspectives of inquiry and the theoretical tools developed in the field. The discussion engages with the work of key sociologists, including Candace Clark, Arlie Russel Hochschild, and Natalia Ruiz-Junco, who have advanced a cartographic approach to the phenomenon in order to map the distribution of empathy and its role in consolidating and reshaping social bonds. The article examines the boundaries, morphology, and structure of “empathy maps”, as well as the social conditions that shape their reproduction, stabilization, and transformation. This perspective highlights the dialectical link between empathy and social reality: empathy contributes to the creation of social ties, while social, cultural, and power structures simultaneously influence its forms and configurations. By adopting a cartographic lens, the article provides conceptual and methodological tools to analyse how empathic geographies are distributed, negotiated, and reshaped, offering insight into the dynamics of empathy in contemporary societies.