Taking About The Weather

June 16 - 30, 2025

Before there was climate science, there was weather: the sky in motion, the scent of ozone, a sudden shift in wind. Weather has always been humanity's default object of collective attention—shared but unstable, felt but hard to hold. It touches the skin, disturbs the mood, alters behavior. But in the age of crisis, weather becomes something else: a signal, a symptom, a site of conflict between what we perceive and what we know.

This seminar explores how we move from lived sensation to planetary sense-making. Where does individual experience end and shared understanding begin? How can individual perceptions of weather drive collective mobilization around climate? And what kind of attention is needed to cross that gap?

Drawing from meteorology, mythology, and media ecology, we’ll investigate how people have historically made meaning from the air around them—and how today’s fragmented weather awareness might be re-stitched into a new civic capacity. Through readings, experimental practices, and collective discussion, we’ll develop tools for attention activism: ways of seeing, naming, and responding to atmospheric change as both personal and political.

Led by Peter Schmidt, writer and Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention.

Classes on Mondays, 6:45 - 9:15pm EST
June 16 - June 30