Julia Vagg

PhD Members

Julia is a classical violinist turned researcher and educator. Her PhD contributes to Professor Dan Harris’ Future Fellowship ‘Creativity in Education and Industry in Asia Pacific’ and explores the emergence and manifestation of empathies in creative collaboration.

Drawing on literature from affect theory to social neuroscience, she theorises empathies as rhizomic and emerging between bodies in interaction. This is explored using video ethnography in theatre devising workshops combined with creative making, storytelling and reflection activities.

Through this work she strives to counter understandings of empathy as purely cognitive perspective taking that are prevalent in neoliberal market discourse, which so often lead to othering and thus perpetuate hierarchical structures that objectify rather than facilitating the co-creation of new understandings and ideas.