Empathy in Planning
PAS QuickNotes 109
By Meaghan McSorley
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Empathy is a skill for sensing others' emotions and imagining their thoughts and feelings. In today's contentious and polarized world, being able to remain open and curious, bridge differences, and find common ground is vitally important for planners. Cultivating empathy and building skills for working with emotions can enhance planners' work with colleagues and community members and support personal well-being. Yet, planners often feel they are supposed to be objective and rational, and they may not have the training to manage strong emotions in themselves or others.
This edition of PAS QuickNotes offers practical strategies to help planners cultivate empathy in ways that support personal well-being, strengthen teamwork with colleagues, and enable authentic community engagement.
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About the Author
Meaghan McSorley
Meaghan McSorley, MPH, PhD is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Florida State University. She received her PhD from the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech, where she was advised by Dr. Nisha Botchwey. She has participated in two successful rounds of NSF Civic Innovation Challenge funding and has experience writing grants and coordinating multi-institution submissions to the NIH, RJWF, and other foundations.
She specializes in community development and engagement with an emphasis on human and environmental health. Her research focuses on the question of how we can work together towards healthy, equitable, and thriving cities for all. Specifically, she is interested in the role that planning practitioners can play in supporting thriving civic cultures, and the tools, mental models, and training they need to do so. Her research spans theory, practice, and pedagogy to explore how planners can help build collective power. Ultimately, her work aims to support planners and communities in co-developing just approaches to systems change and in creating spaces for imagining thriving futures.
She is passionate about planning education as a key pathway to promoting thriving futures and conducts pedagogy research. She leverages active learning strategies to educate future planners about how to be good partners with communities through embodied and reflective praxis.