Slow Burn: Radical Attention and Collective Action in an Age of Crisis

Jul 2nd - 16th, 2024

Crisis is the eternal attention-grabber.  It can create the conditions for unique forms of collective attention, and generate otherwise impossible feats of  collective action. But crises can also erode our capacity for sustained attention. Exhaustion and fear can leave us vulnerable to the squeakiest wheels of the attention economy — especially when attention itself is already in crisis. 

These tensions make the pursuit of attention in crises doubly challenging and profoundly important in an age of cascading disasters and climate calamity. But there is no need to go it alone. Our seminar course will gather learners to experiment with these tensions in attention and crisis through attention practices and discussions that explore the following questions: 

To what and whom do we give ourselves – our attention, our time, our love – when the world seems to be coming undone? What does collective attention look like? How does it change our relationship to crisis? What can we build when we defy the divisive distractions of crises, and gather our attention towards a radical recovery, reckoning, and reimagining?

The work of community practitioners, disaster scholars, climate activists, sci-fi makers, and poets will accompany us along the way. We’ll consider disaster sociology, case studies of crisis community action and mutual aid, and artworks of utopian/dystopian imagination. And we’ll redesign practices commonly used by emergency managers – risk assessments, asset/power mapping, and disaster scenario exercises – to challenge and nourish our individual and collective attention.

Taught by disaster resilience advocate and illustrator Alana (Frank) Tornello.