Letter From the Director
Dear Friends,
At the end of our last event, an attention lab hosted by members of the Strother School of Radical Attention, one of the workshop facilitators asked us to imagine “the great empty cup of attention” from the 1902 Henry James novel The Wings of the Dove, and to think of one thing that each of us would place in that cup. What is one moment in your everyday life, big or small, in which you consistently place your attention? We all shared our individual moments of attention so that, together, we might fill the cup.
I’ve been collecting such meaningful moments scattered across this hard year, trying to hold onto some of the things that I, and maybe also you, placed attention on, and to see them together as collective practices of care in this unsteady world. Many of these moments happened at C21, as we offered events and gatherings and supported research initiatives and collaborative projects that explored the pace of being human across a slower tempo, where “slow” could mean an attentiveness to how and what we each experience, a situatedness in a specific place or body, or it could mean kinship.
Many of these moments we will carry into next year, as C21 strives to counter the unsettledness of our time by continuing to practice slow and collective care. We will be collaborating with UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities on a series of programs on “Aesthetics, Art, and AI,” with grant support from the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes. We are also very pleased to announce that we recently received a grant from the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue to expand our attention activism work within communities across Milwaukee.
As the resources and attitudes surrounding higher education continue to shift into the next fiscal year, C21 will turn its programmatic focus homeward, deepening our roots in Milwaukee through local events and participatory workshops that fill the collective cup and affirm our commitment to building communities of thinkers.
Take care, and we’ll see you again in September,
Jennifer Johung
Director, Center for 21st Century Studies
Let’s Recap: A Year of Slow Knowing
This year, the Center for 21st Century Studies had an amazing new team, a great group of summer Story Cart fellows, and a supportive Advisory Council. We supported a cohort of seven faculty research fellows, three collaboratories, and nine working groups. Our annual theme, Slow Knowing, explored the pace of being human, spawned a weekly blog, and inspired a podcast reboot. We engaged hundreds of people over the course of 33 C21-produced events, co-sponsored programs, and Story Cart activations.
Our programming kicked off with Story Cart voter registration events that built upon the summer’s Story Cart: Trust and the Vote campaign. Our graduate fellows spoke to continuing and first-time voters in the months before an historic presidential election. We brought DoSomething, a national youth-driven civic engagement organization, to campus to talk to UWM students about the issues that matter most to them.
We turned the Trust and the Vote initiative into a multi-media exhibition showcasing interviews collected by our Story Cart fellows. We also partnered with MKElevate to produce an adaptable pop-up exhibition that is currently touring community centers across Milwaukee.
We walked the grounds of Lynden Sculpture Garden with Slow Growing in the Time of Trees. Members of the collaboratory and Lynden introduced us to trees, mushrooms, and trees becoming chairs.
We revived 6.5 Minutes With…C21, our in-house podcast, which had been dormant since May 2023, and produced seven episodes and even made a special episode for an immersive listening session at the UWM Planetarium.
We also revived the UW System Faculty Lecture Series with a virtual lecture by UWM Assistant Professor Derek Handley, who presented research related to his new book Struggle for the City: Rhetorics of Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement.
Members of the Muslim Milwaukee Project, a C21-sponsored working group, invited Milwaukee artists Amal Azzam and Liala Amin to C21 to discuss recent instances of censorship of their work within Milwaukee.
Slow Growing in the Time of Trees returned to Lynden Sculpture Garden with artist Daniel Minter, who led a walk-and-talk tour of his Lynden installation, followed by a wood carving workshop.
C21 hosted two nature-inspired workshops. Kate Beutner of Slow Growing in the Time of Trees led a collaborative writing exercise focused on fungi. C21 staff collaborated with Sociocultural Programming on a poetry and nature walk that celebrated poet Ada Limon’s visit to UWM.
AI and the Humanities, a C21-sponsored collaboratory, hosted a lecture by award-winning author Meghan O’Gieblyn. O’Gieblyn discussed the purpose of thinking in the age of machine learning, covering ground from the apparent thoughtlessness of Adolf Eichmann to bad AI recipe suggestions.
In our last big event of the year, C21 welcomed Kyle Whyte, the George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, to UWM for a lecture on Indigenous concepts of kinship and how they might model new approaches to environmental responsibility.
The academic year wrapped with a visit from the Strother School for Radical Attention. We learned about attention activism and put our Slow Knowing theme into practice through perception exercises and shared reflection. We loved it so much we’re going to build on this workshop in the coming year.
2024-25 may have been a challenging year, but enough friction starts a fire. As we prepare for 2025-26, the year of Slow Care, we are buoyed by a renewed dedication to our mission: to foster a community of thinkers bold enough to truly address the pressing issues of our time.