“Insensitivity Training”

Abstract

This essay begins with a brief history of sensitivity training, a therapeutic and organizational protocol for the instrumentalization of empathy that gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century. The reflection on sensitivity training serves as a wind-up to a meditation on the version of insensitivity training that television manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, both gestures provide the basis to make a pedagogical call for an alternative, critical version of insensitivity training for contemporary students. The essay then explores how the meanings of in/sensitivity help to set up that pedagogical project and suggest its lineaments, as well as what that project should look and sound like, within the horizon in which the pandemic still very much establishes the terms and conditions for much pedagogical and scholarly work. More generally, the essay considers how the versions of such work altered by the rise and spread of COVID-19 may have made some subjects laboring in higher education become pandemic television—and what sanguine, ingenious responses to that becoming one may embrace. Finally, the essay moves to a concrete television case study that has instructional value for the would-be instigator of insensitivity training: Jann, a series saturated with elaborations and unfoldings of—which is to say, blueprints for—the uses of awkwardness, discomfort, and insensitivity.