Fall 2022

Pay Attention! 

What does it mean to pay attention? To notice, bear witness, remain vigilant? How do we compose our embodied minds into states of attention? By watching, listening, expecting, awaiting, and/or following? What attracts, arrests, or fixes our attention?  Where do attentiveness, absorption, and focused immersion leave off and boredom, distraction, noise, hyper-saturation and overwhelm begin? Paying attention to attention reveals systems of valuation: what and whom do we choose to notice? How is our attention commoditized and marketed through contemporary screen- and browsing-time? What can be learned by tracking the historical forms through which attention has been theorized and practiced, and the technologies, cultural forms, and modes of production that have shaped it in the past and present? What forms of discipline does the compulsion to attend entail, and how is our capacity to recognize filtered and trained? How do new algorithmic techniques capture and monetize our attention? This theme invites scholarship on attention and attentiveness across the disciplines. Projects might include work on the political economy and commodification of attention; the attentive sensorium and our capacity to engage through various senses; cultural, critical and aesthetic forms of arresting attention; technologies and techniques of focus and honing attention; wanted and unwanted, undesired, or menacing attention; attention as a strategy of surveillance, governance, and policing; and attending as a form of tending to others.

Lectures 

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted.  Locations vary by date.