Abstract
Distraction is experienced as one of the key challenges of our time. Digital distractions have been blamed for everything up to and including the destruction of democracy. How can universities rise to the challenge of providing a research base for exploring the concept of attention? Every discipline studies attention in some form or another. Psychology, neurobiology and psychiatry study systems of attention within the brain and the person. Social science, and humanities disciplines study the politics, sociologies and cultural workings of attention. The arts explore how different art forms manipulate attention differently and for different ends. All of these disciplines use radically different methodologies in their exploration of attention and all explore different facets of the same attention system. So, what happens if we try to bring all of this together to articulate a new 'interdisciplinary discipline' of Attention Studies, capable of addressing some of the key challenges of our times from a deep and united research base? That's the aim of a new project I'm developing with Oxford University press: one which brings together innovative publishing methods with a new approach to working across disciplines. This talk outlines the project, working through some of the decisions involved and exploring how new ways of interdisciplinary working and publishing are essential for enabling us bring our research to bear on some of the most pressing problems of our times.
Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology and Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute at University of Edinburgh. She began her career as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge, and later moved to New York University as a professor of in the school of the interdisciplinary global liberal arts, and as Director of Digital Humanities for NYU. She returned to the UK in 2018 as Professor of Culture and Technology and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London. At King’s she founded and led the Digital Futures Institute. Marion is interested in the relationship between culture and technology (considering ‘technology’ in the broadest sense), and in the ways in which we create and organize knowledge. She has focused these interests through developing the multidisciplinary research field of Attention Studies, as well as leading the creation of new knowledge infrastructures in universities across three countries. See https://www.marionthain.org/
