Cultivating Compassion in Communication Studies

Abstract

The people of the United States and elsewhere who consistently continue to suffer systematic economic, social, and political injustices are often overlooked and unacknowledged in the field of Communication Studies. It is this kind of degrading, humiliating, and marginalizing existence of the “suffering other” that urgently exhorts us to cultivate and practice compassion in our discipline. In this essay, I argue that it is simply not enough to have a social justice focus in Communication Studies. By using Tibetan Buddhist teachings, especially the Dalai Lama’s on compassion, I argue that there is also an important need to augment social justice with attention to the role compassion plays in addressing social injustices from a spiritual perspective in the field of Communication Studies. I also explore some ways compassion can be cultivated in our students.