‘Humanising’ Statelessness objective apart from their specific messages — create empathy among the participants. How do we define empathy? Rabiaa once told me, ‘empathy means feeling like someone. When you can feel like what a stateless person feels, that will create empathy’. 75 Empathy as a guiding concept for creating feeling and emotion for others is well illustrated and supported by the existing literature. For instance, Faith Valente argued: Empathetic understanding is both an important determinant of how well we communicate with each other as well as a personal characteristic that facilitates our ability to persuade other people to accept an idea, feel a particular way, or pursue a certain course of action. 76 Thus, empathy can create cumulative responses and processes for further action. As Ralph Adolphs mentions, each response from an empathetic attribution is likely to start other empathetic processes and responses. 77 As a practice, empathy defines our sociality — it is intricately connected with ‘shared emotions’ and ‘social identity’. 78 Therefore, empathy can be a useful method for learning and reaching out to other people. For instance, Adil Kutlu and Lokman Coskun discussed how empathy enabled students to get engaged in, and obtain, the desired outcome in school. They argued: Empathy teaches the teachers, parents, and the other people the way how to feel the other people feel in the same fashion. Because, it is not possible to make people have the same feelings and the same experiences in their lives, but it is possible to put yourself in other's shoes to feel what they feel. 79 Creative Court and Empathy and Risk wanted to undertake a similar task; create empathy for stateless people among the participants of the conference who would later do their best to erase statelessness. Throughout the conference, several artworks and performances succeeded in creating empathy within the participants, including me. For instance, on the first day of the conference, Rabiaa asked me to write down ‘the absent’ and put it on an empty chair (Figure 1). I then heard that there was a plan to keep a chair empty for every staged session. I realised that this symbolic gesture was to recognise stateless people — this conference was about them, but none of them could be here without documents to travel. I truly felt the message conveyed. It was a symbol of silence illustrating the absence of stateless people and their lack of legal identity. This simple yet powerful gesture of artistic intervention was presenting stateless people, generating feelings for them in myself and the participants. As one participant said, ‘it is funny that we are here in a conference on statelessness, 75 76 77 78 79 Informal Conversation with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur Rahman, Creative Court 4 April 2019). Faith Valente, ‘Empathy and Communication: A Model of Empathy Development’ (2016) 3(1) Journal of New Media and Mass Communication 1. Ralph Adolphs, ‘The Social Brain: Neural Basis of Social Knowledge’ [2009] 60 Annual Review of Psychology 693, 716. Thomas Szanto and Joel Krueger, ‘Introduction: Empathy, Shared Emotions and Social Identity’ (2019) 38(11) Topoi 153. Adil Kutlu and Lokman Coskun, ‘The Role of Empathy in the Learning Process and Its Fruitful Outcomes: A Comparative Study’ (2014) 4(2) Journal of Educational Research 203. 285