Slow movements\u2014across food, cities, science, scholarship and more\u2014call attention to embodied processes of building and maintaining collective life that resist the fast-paced efficiency models, rapid rewards, and short attention spans that increasingly seem to dominant human responses to 21st century social, political, and ecological challenges. As the accelerated pace of machine and computing time collides with evolutionary, celestial, and deep time, the Center for 21st Century Studies hopes to highlight how interdisciplinary humanities research can help us understand what humans are in time with, and how human pace is attuned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This spring, our programming will center thought leaders whose work explores our collective unmooring from, or hopeful reintegration with, the cyclical, ecological, and social forces that once structured human activity. Get ready for a scholar who writes about the impact of climate change on Indigenous ways of life, workshops designed by attention activists, park-specific poetry, quick podcasts about slow topics, and an essayist who writes about gods, humans, animals, and machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To get you into a slow state of mind, C21 will be releasing media recommendations now through early spring. Our weekly Slow Digest will deliver three-ish recommendations per week, curated around a particular slow topic. Some editions of the Slow Digest will feature essays, insights, and annotations from C21 staff and stakeholders. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This week, we’re focusing on a fundamental prerequisite for the act of knowing: attention. Below are a selection of cardinal texts that informed our understanding of what it might mean to know slowly, to do and act slowly, and why that matters in our seemingly endless loop of daily urgencies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This discussion was part of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences’ 2111th Stated Meeting. It includes remarks from Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and a conversation between Allen and arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown that explored the practical uses of the humanities, strategies for demonstrating their importance, and their place within current political and cultural conflicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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