An experimental
educational initiative for
the reclamation of radical human attention
Why Attention?
The technological advances of the 21st century are driving never-before-seen changes in the conditions of human existence. Digital platforms and proliferating modes of solicitation subject us to vast and competing streams of information. This new “Attention Economy” continuously fracks human beings for the vaporous money-value that can be pumped out of our eyeballs. The harmful consequences of these changes are real, measurable, and ubiquitous — for attention is the very stuff from which our selves, our communities, and our lifeways are made.
But these new technologies pose powerful opportunities for good — so long as we are fundamentally equipped to resist their dehumanizing, fragmenting, and financializing influences, and to decide for ourselves what world we want to make (and inhabit) with others.
Human attention is the critical faculty required to navigate these challenges. Our ability to care for ourselves, others, and the Earth itself – all this hinges, ultimately, on our ability to choose where, and how, we direct our attention. To do so, we must understand what attention is, and might be; what it is good for and how we might use it for good, together.
This is the work of The Matthew Strother School of Radical Attention, a non-profit experimental institution of education and collaboration dedicated to cultivating radical attention as a foundation of human well-being — and well-being beyond the human, too. Through creative projects, courses on the history, philosophy, and politics of attention, and experiential Attention Lab workshops, we fashion and collectively implement tools to reclaim human attention, and thereby protect and cultivate the many goods of shared life that it produces.
Learn more at:
schoolofattention.org
We pursue change in three ways:
Organizing
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Coalition-building with communities who see the need to resist the theft of our attention.
Education
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Learning about attention and attention capture through group study and shared practice.
Sanctuary
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Cultivating spaces (physical, virtual, fixed, mobile) that provide shelter and nourishment for attentional resources.
Our programs combine study and practice
Through our reading- and discussion-based Seminar Courses, we seek a deepened theoretical, historical and political understanding of the role of attention in human life. Each course culminates in a free and public Attention Lab workshop, where students and teacher-facilitators are invited to share emerging strategies for collective thought and action in our changing attention ecology.
Seminar Courses
Our courses —which are co-taught by university professors, teachers, and artists — are not simply about attention. Rather, they see attention as the door through which we can most deeply engage the Big Questions at the heart of humanistic inquiry: Who are we? What constitutes our reality? What is truth, and beauty? How might we most fruitfully live together? What is the role of art and language in advancing this task? What is a better world, and how might we build it?
Attention Labs
Our free, experiential, community-centered workshops are dedicated to the exploration of radical human attention. These gatherings draw on deep and various traditions of attentional communities. Through group practices of attention and guided discussions, we create and test tools to build sanctuaries of attention — as well as networks of solidarity to sustain them. We’ve held our workshops for hundreds of participants internationally in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
