Attensity! Virtual Book Club (2/4)
SIGN UP HERE!
“We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. To push back, we need more than individual willpower or isolated efforts. We need a movement”.
What’s better than reading Attensity! on your own? Gathering with others to read it, of course! Join with friends from around the world to read and discuss the “Silent Spring of the Attention Activism Movement.” Each week, we’ll read a section of the book and gather on Saturdays to discuss its impact on our individual and collective lives. And stay tuned through the whole book group for some special Friends of Attention guests! Don’t have the book yet? No problem! You can get a copy at your local indie bookstore, here, or here. Or feel free to listen along with the excellent audio book, here.
This Book Club will meet on Saturdays, July 25th to August 15th from 1:00 - 2:15pm EST on Zoom.
Participants who attend three of the four sessions will receive a free Sanctuary Kit delivered right to their door!
SPECULATIVE PSYCHOTECHNICS (6/6)
Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.
At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.
At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention.
Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.
Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.
Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.
Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
GHOST HUNTING (1/3)
Most ghosts don't know they're ghosts; they have to be told. This seminar proceeds from the simple but potentially distressing premise that you are already a ghost. Ghost hunting is a technology of attention and a set of practices for noticing what we have trained ourselves not to see.
Together, we will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting: its tools (spirit boxes, EMF meters, cameras, the Estes method), its methods, locations, and obsessions. We will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. But the real target of our instruments will be ourselves: how we define ghosts, what technologies mediate these definitions, and what it would mean to finally pay attention to our own haunted condition.
Drawing on both historical study and hands-on experimentation, this seminar asks: what does it mean to hunt for something you already are? What can ghost hunting teach us about attention, mediation, and the eerie persistence of the present? Do you accept that you are a ghost? Can you achieve ghost consciousness?
No prior experience with the paranormal (or its theory) is required. Generosity, curiosity, and a willingness to be haunted are the only prerequisites. Skeptics welcome, ghosts especially.
Led by Katherine Guinness, theorist and historian of contemporary art at the University of Maryland.
Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 3rd-17th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
![ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/647e2e2c944dab371f654149/1761762662497-W61R3OUGOX8RUT19IQMR/Untitled+design+%281%29.png)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND (3/3)
What if attention is a path and the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?
Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking.
This is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.
Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Attention Lab: SANCTUARY
The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them.
![ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/647e2e2c944dab371f654149/1755618597294-KS67ESMC7FL8CZIBXMAX/Screenshot+2025-08-19+114824.png)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Attensity! Virtual Book Club (3/4)
SIGN UP HERE!
“We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. To push back, we need more than individual willpower or isolated efforts. We need a movement”.
What’s better than reading Attensity! on your own? Gathering with others to read it, of course! Join with friends from around the world to read and discuss the “Silent Spring of the Attention Activism Movement.” Each week, we’ll read a section of the book and gather on Saturdays to discuss its impact on our individual and collective lives. And stay tuned through the whole book group for some special Friends of Attention guests! Don’t have the book yet? No problem! You can get a copy at your local indie bookstore, here, or here. Or feel free to listen along with the excellent audio book, here.
This Book Club will meet on Saturdays, July 25th to August 15th from 1:00 - 2:15pm EST on Zoom.
Participants who attend three of the four sessions will receive a free Sanctuary Kit delivered right to their door!
STUDY SUMMIT '26
From the 10th to the 13th of August 2026, Attention Activists associated with the School of Radical Attention will convene for a study and strategy residency at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, CT. For our inaugural summit, we will examine key texts in Attention Activism and produce a national organizing strategy for the coming year. Co-organized by Eleanor Lambert, Connor Griffin, Peter Schmidt, and D. Graham Burnett (in absentia).
For more information: peter@sustainedattention.net.
GHOST HUNTING (2/3)
Most ghosts don't know they're ghosts; they have to be told. This seminar proceeds from the simple but potentially distressing premise that you are already a ghost. Ghost hunting is a technology of attention and a set of practices for noticing what we have trained ourselves not to see.
Together, we will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting: its tools (spirit boxes, EMF meters, cameras, the Estes method), its methods, locations, and obsessions. We will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. But the real target of our instruments will be ourselves: how we define ghosts, what technologies mediate these definitions, and what it would mean to finally pay attention to our own haunted condition.
Drawing on both historical study and hands-on experimentation, this seminar asks: what does it mean to hunt for something you already are? What can ghost hunting teach us about attention, mediation, and the eerie persistence of the present? Do you accept that you are a ghost? Can you achieve ghost consciousness?
No prior experience with the paranormal (or its theory) is required. Generosity, curiosity, and a willingness to be haunted are the only prerequisites. Skeptics welcome, ghosts especially.
Led by Katherine Guinness, theorist and historian of contemporary art at the University of Maryland.
Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 3rd-17th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
Exhibition Opening: When The Camera Looks
RSVP HERE!
Join us to celebrate the opening of our summer show, When The Camera Looks, featuring short films by Claudia Claremi and The Friends of Attention that re-encounter the camera and screen as technologies altering our relationship to space and time. Anthesis (2023) and The Mirror Image: Attention and Infinite Reflection (2022) each document outdoor gatherings where The Friends of Attention activated protocols engaging with the technological conditions of filming and film-making.
In the spirit of these experimental gatherings that laid the foundation for the Strother School of Radical Attention, we will invite you to a small indoor picnic with a flower arrangement table. You will be invited to leave the flower wreaths behind on our altar or take them home.
This is a free event. Light refreshments will be provided.
Image courtesy of Claudia Claremi and The Friends of Attention.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
SIMONE WEIL (1/3)
If there were a patron saint of radical attention, it would be the 20th century activist philosopher Simone Weil. Weil believed that existence itself is God's act of self-renunciation – and that by "giving up being the center of the world in imagination," we participate in the ongoing creation of reality, and especially of our neighbor.
Since she also believed the deepest truths are “experimental,” needing to be lived before they can be verified, this class will be organized as a shared experiment in the hypothetical reality of creative self-renunciation. We’ll adopt practices of attention inspired by Weil’s writing – meditation, attending to others, and patience – in order to reflect on and share from the experience of what Weil calls the “void.”
For intellectual exercises, we will read Weil’s work focusing on particular guiding metaphors - water, centers/centering, and poetry – feeling for how our symbols and ways of attending either add dimension to our experience of reality or flatten it.
Our intention is that between Weil's intellectual models, homeopathic doses of the void, and the world of our shared experiences, something sparks: a heightened capacity to be here, at the center of the world's re-creation.
Led by Bert and Emma Fitzgerald, co-organizers of the Simone Weil House in Portland, OR.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 12th-26th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Attention Lab: COALITION
The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them.
Attensity! Virtual Book Club (4/4)
SIGN UP HERE!
“We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. To push back, we need more than individual willpower or isolated efforts. We need a movement”.
What’s better than reading Attensity! on your own? Gathering with others to read it, of course! Join with friends from around the world to read and discuss the “Silent Spring of the Attention Activism Movement.” Each week, we’ll read a section of the book and gather on Saturdays to discuss its impact on our individual and collective lives. And stay tuned through the whole book group for some special Friends of Attention guests! Don’t have the book yet? No problem! You can get a copy at your local indie bookstore, here, or here. Or feel free to listen along with the excellent audio book, here.
This Book Club will meet on Saturdays, July 25th to August 15th from 1:00 - 2:15pm EST on Zoom.
Participants who attend three of the four sessions will receive a free Sanctuary Kit delivered right to their door!
GHOST HUNTING (3/3)
Most ghosts don't know they're ghosts; they have to be told. This seminar proceeds from the simple but potentially distressing premise that you are already a ghost. Ghost hunting is a technology of attention and a set of practices for noticing what we have trained ourselves not to see.
Together, we will explore the history and practice of ghost hunting: its tools (spirit boxes, EMF meters, cameras, the Estes method), its methods, locations, and obsessions. We will read, experiment, and create our own instruments for detecting the paranormal. But the real target of our instruments will be ourselves: how we define ghosts, what technologies mediate these definitions, and what it would mean to finally pay attention to our own haunted condition.
Drawing on both historical study and hands-on experimentation, this seminar asks: what does it mean to hunt for something you already are? What can ghost hunting teach us about attention, mediation, and the eerie persistence of the present? Do you accept that you are a ghost? Can you achieve ghost consciousness?
No prior experience with the paranormal (or its theory) is required. Generosity, curiosity, and a willingness to be haunted are the only prerequisites. Skeptics welcome, ghosts especially.
Led by Katherine Guinness, theorist and historian of contemporary art at the University of Maryland.
Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 3rd-17th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3) EU/UK
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
SIMONE WEIL (2/3)
If there were a patron saint of radical attention, it would be the 20th century activist philosopher Simone Weil. Weil believed that existence itself is God's act of self-renunciation – and that by "giving up being the center of the world in imagination," we participate in the ongoing creation of reality, and especially of our neighbor.
Since she also believed the deepest truths are “experimental,” needing to be lived before they can be verified, this class will be organized as a shared experiment in the hypothetical reality of creative self-renunciation. We’ll adopt practices of attention inspired by Weil’s writing – meditation, attending to others, and patience – in order to reflect on and share from the experience of what Weil calls the “void.”
For intellectual exercises, we will read Weil’s work focusing on particular guiding metaphors - water, centers/centering, and poetry – feeling for how our symbols and ways of attending either add dimension to our experience of reality or flatten it.
Our intention is that between Weil's intellectual models, homeopathic doses of the void, and the world of our shared experiences, something sparks: a heightened capacity to be here, at the center of the world's re-creation.
Led by Bert and Emma Fitzgerald, co-organizers of the Simone Weil House in Portland, OR.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 12th-26th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Radical Attention & Economies of Care: A Conversation with the co-founders of the Simone Weil House
What does a care-based economy look like in practice? On Thursday, August 20, we're convening with Emma Coley Fitzgerald and Bert Fitzgerald to envision an alternative attention economy: not the industrial-scale monetization of human eyeballs, but the structures of mutual care that undergird "a society where it is easier to be good."
As co-founders of the Simone Weil House, Emma and Bert built an initiative to help communities in Portland, Oregon self-organize their own zero-interest micro-credit unions and created a "free exchange area" for a non-transactional local economy.
Join us to explore these worldbuilding efforts in theory and in practice!
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3) EU/UK
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
SIMONE WEIL (3/3)
If there were a patron saint of radical attention, it would be the 20th century activist philosopher Simone Weil. Weil believed that existence itself is God's act of self-renunciation – and that by "giving up being the center of the world in imagination," we participate in the ongoing creation of reality, and especially of our neighbor.
Since she also believed the deepest truths are “experimental,” needing to be lived before they can be verified, this class will be organized as a shared experiment in the hypothetical reality of creative self-renunciation. We’ll adopt practices of attention inspired by Weil’s writing – meditation, attending to others, and patience – in order to reflect on and share from the experience of what Weil calls the “void.”
For intellectual exercises, we will read Weil’s work focusing on particular guiding metaphors - water, centers/centering, and poetry – feeling for how our symbols and ways of attending either add dimension to our experience of reality or flatten it.
Our intention is that between Weil's intellectual models, homeopathic doses of the void, and the world of our shared experiences, something sparks: a heightened capacity to be here, at the center of the world's re-creation.
Led by Bert and Emma Fitzgerald, co-organizers of the Simone Weil House in Portland, OR.
Wednesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
August 12th-26th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Attention Lab: STUDY
The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them.
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3) EU/UK
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 1/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Sidewalk Study: UNSUNG, NOT UNSEEN
Entering America's birthday month, we call into question narratives of what makes someone’s "personal hero." The figures who get memorialized — in headlines, in statues, in the stories we inherit as history — are never the whole picture. They are a selection, and every selection is also an erasure. Who shapes our lives in ways that don't make it into the archive? Perhaps our heroes are those who challenge the myths sold to us as truth, who carve out space and place for what has been deliberately obscured.
Text: Jessica Zetteler’s “Hero Today, Gone Tomorrow?” & Luke Stewart’s The Execution of Sun Ra (Volume II): A Conversation with Thomas Stanley
Date: Thursday, July 30th at 7pm
Location: Domino Park with Lindsee & Anha
If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net
CULTURE JAMMING (3/3)
“If you want to defeat a god or an ideal, go for the joints.”
-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
Across mythological traditions, the trickster exists to outwit the devouring forces of the world, redistribute power, and catalyze more lifegiving worlds. A shapeshifter and thief, trickster wields mischief against muscle to dissolve the status quo and make the conditions of life pliable again.
CULTURE JAMMING is the modern trickster’s modus operandi. By intercepting the codes of dominant culture through subvertising, infiltration, mimicry, and satire, culture jammers wield the trickster's ancient mischief to deflate corporate power at the interfaces where it attempts to shape public perception — and where the attention economy thrives on the invisibility of its machinery.When the game is rigged, trickster changes the rules.
In this course we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers, and in holding them accountable. How does the trickster sensibility shift how and what we perceive? Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, Iain McGilchrist, and the history of culture jamming from Romantic Era revolutionaries through the Luddite Club and the Yes Men, we’ll develop a practical and imaginative toolkit for intervention and collective attentional liberation.
Led by Molly Gore, filmmaker, activist, and core member of prankster collective The Yes Men.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 16th-30th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo Credit: Bess Adler
Sidewalk Study SILICON VALLEY, CA : FINDING OUR GARDENS
In her 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” the writer, activist and poet Alice Walker illuminates the hidden creative worlds of her ancestors, positioning them as unsung heroes. Dominant narratives of Black womanhood and the requirements of daily living, she argues, have long obscured these everyday sanctuaries in Black women’s lives.
But Walker insists that “our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see.” While “in search of my mother’s garden,” she writes, “I found my own.”
How might we uncover these hidden and heroic spaces in our own histories? Walker’s words will accompany us as we attend to those selfsame gardens in our lives and communities.
Text: Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Date: Thursday, July 30th
Location: Rengstorff Park, Mountain View, CA with Erika & Peter
Sidewalk Study ST. LOUIS, MO: (UN)DECLARED KNOWLEDGE
What is knowledge when it is unshared? What is experience without connection?
In this autobiographical memoir, Hope Jahren traces her own path to becoming a renowned geobiologist through her own mental health struggles, funding fights, and sexism in the field. Her text showcases one woman’s efforts to find belonging within the scientific community while honoring her own attention to the oft-overlooked world of botany.
This practice invites us to consider what it is to know something no one else knows and how to hold knowledge while looking for the avenues to share.
Text: Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl
Date: Wednesday, July 29 at 6:30pm Central
Location: South Grand/Tower Grove Park with Chris and Michelle
If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study WASHINGTON, DC: Ladder to the Stars
In a sprawling epic spanning lifetimes and bloodlines, Steinbeck argues that the most redemptive part of the human experience is our ability to choose. That in the face of good or evil, vice or virtue, pursuit or resignation, you always have the heroic choice. To defy your instincts, your past, or your circumstances.
In this Study, we’ll attend to natures. What does it mean to live by your nature? To be constrained by it? To defy it? How do other objects in the universe correspond to their natures?
Text: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
Date: Wednesday, July 29th @ 6:30pm
Location: Cleveland Park (Cleveland Park Library to National Cathedral) with Kanika & Josh
If you are interested in joining the Washington DC mailing list, fill out this form.
LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND (2/3)
What if attention is a path and the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?
Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking.
This is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.
Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Sidewalk Study SILICON VALLEY, CA : THE LIFE STORY
“Heroes are powerful,” writes Ursula K. Le Guin in a 1986 essay. “[B]efore you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the maker and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn't their story. It’s his.”
Does the hero’s journey, told again and again in our time, really reflect the world we want to live in? Might there be other stories—of growth, cultivation, care, and curiosity—that offer an alternative to the zero-sum game of heroes and villains?
In this study, join us as we follow Le Guin’s lead in imagining the possibilities of story beyond the limits of the hero’s journey.
Text: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag of Fiction
Date: Sunday, July 26th
Location: California Ave Caltrain station, Palo Alto, CA with Erika & Peter
If you are interested in joining the Silicon Valley, CA mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study CLEVELAND, OH: HAVE A CARE YOU VILLAINS
“I shout to you, ‘Don’t be afraid, mother. I am here.’”
Join us as we explore Rabindranath Tagore's tender and thought-provoking poem “The Hero” — a short, easy read about a boy who dreams of proving his courage to his mother. Together we'll discuss what heroism really means, where it comes from, and why we all carry that quiet longing to be seen as brave by the people we love most.
Text: Rabindranath Tagore’s “The Hero”
Date: Sunday, July 26th at 2pm
Location: Voinovich Park, Cleveland, OH with Aditi & Rob
If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.
Attention Lab: STUDY
The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them.
Sidewalk Study AUSTIN, TX: The HERO TODAY
What does it mean to become fully human in a world where inherited stories no longer hold? When old myths lose their power, what guides us toward meaning?
In the closing pages of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell argues that the modern hero faces a challenge unlike any before. As scientific discovery, individualism, and global interconnectedness reshape human life, the symbols and rituals that once organized our inner worlds have begun to dissolve. The work before us is not to return to the past, but to uncover forms of meaning capable of meeting the conditions of contemporary life.
In this Study, we'll use Campbell's essay as a lens for attending to the world around us. Together we'll notice the symbols, rituals, stories, and environments that shape our lives, asking not only what we inherit, but what we continue to create through our attention.
Text: Joseph Cambell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Date: Sunday, July 26 at 10:30am
Location: Canopy Austin in Austin, Texas with Chris and Leah
If you are interested in joining the Austin, TX mailing list, fill out this form.
SPECULATIVE PSYCHOTECHNICS (5/6)
Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.
At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.
At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention.
Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.
Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.
Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.
Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Attensity! Virtual Book Club (1/4)
SIGN UP HERE!
“We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. To push back, we need more than individual willpower or isolated efforts. We need a movement”.
What’s better than reading Attensity! on your own? Gathering with others to read it, of course! Join with friends from around the world to read and discuss the “Silent Spring of the Attention Activism Movement.” Each week, we’ll read a section of the book and gather on Saturdays to discuss its impact on our individual and collective lives. And stay tuned through the whole book group for some special Friends of Attention guests! Don’t have the book yet? No problem! You can get a copy at your local indie bookstore, here, or here. Or feel free to listen along with the excellent audio book, here.
This Book Club will meet on Saturdays, July 25th to August 15th from 1:00 - 2:15pm EST on Zoom.
Participants who attend three of the four sessions will receive a free Sanctuary Kit delivered right to their door!
SoRA x Magic City Books
RSVP HERE!
SoRA is excited to partner with Magic City Books for a community conversation on Attensity!, a rallying cry against the commodification of human attention and a call to reclaim attention through collective action, led by Friend of Attention, Quinn Marchman. Together, we will discuss the rise of the "human fracking" industry and the growing movement to liberate human attention from the forces of Big Tech.
Following the conversation, participants will be led through a SoRA Attention Lab, engaging directly with ideas from Attensity! through facilitated discussions and collective attention practices.
This unique event will take place at TCC's Thomas K. McKeon Center for Creativity, 910 South Boston Ave. in Tulsa.
Attensity! released in January 2026, and you can purchase a copy through Magic City Books ahead of time or at the event.
CULTURE JAMMING (2/3)
“If you want to defeat a god or an ideal, go for the joints.”
-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
Across mythological traditions, the trickster exists to outwit the devouring forces of the world, redistribute power, and catalyze more lifegiving worlds. A shapeshifter and thief, trickster wields mischief against muscle to dissolve the status quo and make the conditions of life pliable again.
CULTURE JAMMING is the modern trickster’s modus operandi. By intercepting the codes of dominant culture through subvertising, infiltration, mimicry, and satire, culture jammers wield the trickster's ancient mischief to deflate corporate power at the interfaces where it attempts to shape public perception — and where the attention economy thrives on the invisibility of its machinery.When the game is rigged, trickster changes the rules.
In this course we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers, and in holding them accountable. How does the trickster sensibility shift how and what we perceive? Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, Iain McGilchrist, and the history of culture jamming from Romantic Era revolutionaries through the Luddite Club and the Yes Men, we’ll develop a practical and imaginative toolkit for intervention and collective attentional liberation.
Led by Molly Gore, filmmaker, activist, and core member of prankster collective The Yes Men.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 16th-30th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo Credit: Bess Adler
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND (1/3)
What if attention is a path and the mind is not a “point of subjectivity” but a landscape of subjectivities we navigate through thinking? The hippocampus is often called the brain's GPS – and recent neuroscience suggests this role may be even stranger and more expansive than it first appears. As it turns out, we use the same bodily habits to move through a neighborhood as we do to move through a difficult conversation, a grief, an idea, or a virtual space. What kinds of attention does this “navigational mind” make possible, and what emerges when we give our attention to these orienting patterns themselves?
Drawing on the work of neuroscientists, philosophers, and Hiott’s own accomplished research on the navigational mind, we'll ask what it means to understand cognition as something that happens at multiple ecological scales – and what is at stake when those ecologies are threatened by attention fracking.
This is about the embodied, ongoing action (movement) of attention. It is about noticing where we are and how that is always connected to all the places (geographical, social, virtual, etc.) that we have ever been. We will let science and philosophy come together with our own ongoing way-making and way-finding to empower practical shifts in the power and presence of our mind, consciousness and care.
Led by Andrea Hiott, philosopher and neuroscientist at Universität Heidelberg and author of Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 21st-August 4th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ANIMAL PHENOMENOLOGY (3/3)
When philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?”, he comes up against a core problem: humans can only think in human terms. As Nagel says, “If I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” But do not despair. We can dare to push beyond Nagel’s limits. Moving between science, philosophy, and art, this seminar will explore possible paths for understanding the subjective experience of non-human animals.
We will begin with human and non-human umwelt or life-worlds. Attuning to our own sensory inputs, mental constructs, and bodily movement, we will describe our life-worlds and then attend to the senses, mental matrixes, and corporeal movement of various animals. Then, drawing on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Young, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, we will bend our subjective experience to more fully develop “what it is like” to be other-than-human. Over the course of the seminar, each participant will create paths of kinship with their selected other creatures and present ways of understanding these non-human life-worlds.
No background in philosophy is necessary. Bring curiosity, creativity, and wonder.
Led by Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.
Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 6th-20th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” by Henri Rousseau, via public domain.
Sidewalk Study CLEVELAND, OH: ANOTHER KIND OF BRAVE
Heroism is everywhere: in headlines, in origin stories, in the quiet pressure we feel to live up to something. But what does it actually require of us? Not glory, not spectacle. In her poem “Heroism”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman says it's the grinding, lonely courage to think a new thought and live by it, even when the people you love can't follow you there yet. And underneath that courage, she finds something stranger — a love that can wound, that can lose, and still keep giving. Join us as we sit with what it means to be heroic in the life you are actually living. What are you holding onto that the world around you isn't ready for yet?
Text: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Heroism”
Date: Sunday, July 19th at 2pm
Location: Lincoln Park, Tremont, OH with Aditi & Rob
If you are interested in joining the Cleveland, OH mailing list, fill out this form.
SPECULATIVE PSYCHOTECHNICS (4/6)
Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. This seminar explores how that transformation was developed in laboratories, and how attention activists today are breaking open the frame. We will work across two parallel spaces over six weeks: SoRA's seminar room, and a studio at Pioneer Works.
At SoRA, we will trace the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. We will examine the history of psychological "attention studies" across research programs including Edward B. Titchener's psychometrics and Wilhelm Wundt's reaction-time rigs.
At Pioneer Works, we will create a full-scale reconstruction of Titchener's 1890s acoustic experiments from the Cornell laboratory as a site for our own hands-on thinking about attention.
Across both spaces, we will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.
Led by Julian Chehirian, multimedia artist, historian of science, and current Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works.
Note: This special six-week Studio Seminar will meet at SoRA’s Sanctuary Gallery on Saturdays June 20th, July 11th, and July 25th, and at Pioneer Works on June 27th, July 18th, and August 1st.
Saturdays, 2:00-4:30pm
June 20th - August 1st (no class on July 4th)
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Sidewalk Study: HEROES WE CARRY
Stories are powerful cultural vessels. Yet so often they are diminished by dominant narratives of conflict, conquest and death. What gets lost when the only story worth telling is the killer story?
In this study, we'll look at a folk tale from the Zapatistas through the lens of Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, and ask: What worlds become possible when we unsettle what Le Guin names the ‘killer story’? What if small, everyday acts of care and sustenance that keep the world turning were central to our heroic narratives?
Text: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag of Fiction & “The Story of the Sword, the Tree, the Stone, and the Water” from Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World
Date: Friday, July 17th at 7pm
Location: Prospect Park with Cherilyn & staoue
If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net
CULTURE JAMMING (1/3)
“If you want to defeat a god or an ideal, go for the joints.”
-Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
Across mythological traditions, the trickster exists to outwit the devouring forces of the world, redistribute power, and catalyze more lifegiving worlds. A shapeshifter and thief, trickster wields mischief against muscle to dissolve the status quo and make the conditions of life pliable again.
CULTURE JAMMING is the modern trickster’s modus operandi. By intercepting the codes of dominant culture through subvertising, infiltration, mimicry, and satire, culture jammers wield the trickster's ancient mischief to deflate corporate power at the interfaces where it attempts to shape public perception — and where the attention economy thrives on the invisibility of its machinery.When the game is rigged, trickster changes the rules.
In this course we’ll explore what role culture jamming can play in liberating attention from the extractive grasp of the attention economy’s profiteers, and in holding them accountable. How does the trickster sensibility shift how and what we perceive? Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, Iain McGilchrist, and the history of culture jamming from Romantic Era revolutionaries through the Luddite Club and the Yes Men, we’ll develop a practical and imaginative toolkit for intervention and collective attentional liberation.
Led by Molly Gore, filmmaker, activist, and core member of prankster collective The Yes Men.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 16th-30th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Photo Credit: Bess Adler
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 101 [ONLINE] (Session 3/3)
Attention is the touchstone problem of our age. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented concentration of technical and financial power has successfully monetized human attention. The harms of this new system — in effect, the "fracking" of our most intimate selves — are familiar to all. Less widely understood is the nature of the movement that has emerged to fight back against this historic injustice: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
In this course, we will survey the intellectual and practical foundations of the nascent ATTENTION ACTIVISM movement. We'll draw on texts by Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, and Yves Citton among others. What do the extractive incursions of the Attention Economy mean for shared life in the twenty-first century — and how are communities of activists already working to resist them?
Attention Lab: COALITION
The Attention Labs are an experiential, participatory workshop curriculum dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention. Through group attention practices and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them.
Sidewalk Study ST. LOUIS, MO: ORIGINS
Amazing Fantasy introduces us to a smart young teenager who is not well-regarded by his peers, but by focusing on his own interests, has a mishap that later gives him amazing powers.
Every hero has an origin story, and most don’t understand what they are becoming until they have become. There are heroes all around us — some know it, some don’t, and some are more powerful than they yet understand. We’re each going to find one.
Text: Steve Ditko, Stan Lee & Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy Volume 1 issue 15
Date: Wednesday, July 15 at 6:30pm Central
Location: South Grand/Tower Grove Park with Chris and Michelle
If you are interested in joining the St. Louis, MO mailing list, fill out this form.
Sidewalk Study: ENSOULED BEAUTY
Our "heroes" personify the moral ideal, embodying aesthetic forms that shape our self-conceptions and give expression to the desires that drive us. But heroism doesn't arrive fully formed. So how does heroism come to be? If heroes are symbols of our moral ideals and aspirations, how much of that symbolism is about what virtue is supposed to look like? How does our valuation of beauty mold what we believe is "heroism"? And when does ego tip into vanity — into obsession with the performance of self?
Using The Picture of Dorian Gray, we'll sit with the gap between the image of what we should be and the reality of what we are, questioning how beauty, perfection, and heroism shape the self. The soul, too.
Text: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Date: Tuesday, July 14th at 7pm
Location: Madison Square Park with Katie and Connor
If you are interested in attending this Study, email strotherschool@sustainedattention.net
ATTENTION ACTIVISM 201 [ONLINE] (Session 2/3)
ATTENTION ACTIVISM is the collective movement to push back against the commodification of human attention — what we call "human fracking" — and create, space by community space, a world where we can flourish. In this training, we will explore practical strategies for ATTENTION ACTIVISM, drawing on texts by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Deva Woodly. In the 201 training, we will focus on developing the organizing, facilitation, and movement-building skills required to build groups for ATTENTION ACTIVISM. The bulk of the course will be dedicated to supporting participants toward an organizing project in their own communities.
Completion of our Attention Activism 101 seminar is required for participation in our 201 training. Participants who complete Attention Activism 201 will be eligible for inclusion in our national organizing coalition.
Wednesdays, 7-8:45pm EST
December 3, 10, and 17
On Zoom
RAGE BAIT (3/3)
In 2025, the expression “rage bait” was selected as Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year. Shorthand for the strategy used by content creators to capture our attention by intentionally posting inflammatory content, “rage bait” has become a key strategy of those in power seeking to sow distraction and fear by promoting conspiracies, spreading misinformation, and scapegoating minorities.
This course will use the phenomenon of online “rage bait” to understand our embodied experiences both on the internet and in everyday life. We’ll contemplate rage as both essential to our humanness and the thing that is killing us, drawing from thinkers like Audre Lorde, Zeynep Tufecki, Omar El-Akkad, adrienne marie brown, Mohammed El-Kurd, and Jenny Odell.
We will ask: How can we metabolize rage, and hone our capacity for action, rather than enriching tech companies with our hate-watches, rage comments, and clicks? How can we create survival strategies for an era where digital outrage coincides with, and sometimes overshadows, other forms of relating to one another? What countercultural possibilities and visions for digital citizenship emerge when we refuse to fall for the rage bait that tells us “this is all there can be”?
Led by Malavika Kannan, Gen Z writer and author of the forthcoming novel UNPRECEDENTED TIMES.
Tuesdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 30th- July 14th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
ANIMAL PHENOMENOLOGY (2/3)
When philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?”, he comes up against a core problem: humans can only think in human terms. As Nagel says, “If I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” But do not despair. We can dare to push beyond Nagel’s limits. Moving between science, philosophy, and art, this seminar will explore possible paths for understanding the subjective experience of non-human animals.
We will begin with human and non-human umwelt or life-worlds. Attuning to our own sensory inputs, mental constructs, and bodily movement, we will describe our life-worlds and then attend to the senses, mental matrixes, and corporeal movement of various animals. Then, drawing on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Young, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, we will bend our subjective experience to more fully develop “what it is like” to be other-than-human. Over the course of the seminar, each participant will create paths of kinship with their selected other creatures and present ways of understanding these non-human life-worlds.
No background in philosophy is necessary. Bring curiosity, creativity, and wonder.
Led by Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.
Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 6th-20th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” by Henri Rousseau, via public domain.