Center for 21st Century Studies

Reflecting on Our Year of Slow Care

This year, C21 activated “Slow Care”—a practice that places deliberate attention on the beings, things, and sites that together foster long-term visions of collective life across generations and communities of humans and non-humans, as well as ever-evolving technologies and ecologies. Learn more about Slow Care.

Dear C21 Friends,

As another year comes to a close, I’m thinking back to our opening event: the State of the Humanities MKE panel that has quietly been shaping our vision at the Center. As humanities leaders across Milwaukee from universities and communities gathered to reflect on the state of our shared work, certain things started to become clear: that the future of the humanities is local and collaborative—rooted in the reciprocal partnerships among universities, nonprofits, artists, and community organizations that already animate this city’s cultural life—and that sustainability requires collective care for labor—visible, invisible, and oftentimes precarious. These were not abstract conclusions. They were hard-won recognitions, spoken by friends and colleagues who are doing this work and building these connections every day.

That spirit of recognition has run through our entire year of Slow Care. From the relaunch of our Story Cart as an adaptive space for intimate community conversations, to Human Club events that gathered fellow humans around Milwaukee simply to be together, to the 6.5 Minutes With…C21 podcasts that carried slow care into new disciplines and to new ears, we have been practicing what it looks like to attend to our various worlds in slowness and with intention. And through our Aesthetics, Art, and AI programming with UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities, we asked what care looks like at the boundaries between human and machine creativity as we reinvest in embodied experience and connection beyond optimized predictions.

So as we close this year, we carry its lessons into what comes next. In 2026–2027, C21 enters the third and final year of our SLOW arc with a new theme: Slow Action. Building on the foundations of knowing and caring, we will turn toward the practical and political possibilities of slowness—toward collective organizing, coalition-building, and the patient, relational labor that makes responsive action possible. If this year taught us that care is a practice of fostering and sustaining partnerships over time, next year we ask what it looks like to act together with deliberate attention to the forms, methods, and histories that allow us to tune into our shared goals, even as they shift over time.

With gratitude for each of you who joined us this year, we will see you again in September,

Jennifer Johung

Director, C21