SLOW: The pace of being human
Slow movements—across food, cities, science, scholarship and beyond — call 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.
SLOW will develop over the next three academic years (2024-2027), manifesting in interactive discussions, lectures from internationally renowned experts, film screenings, exhibitions, community-driven experiential events, and more.
Each academic year will explore distinct aspects of slowness:
- Slow Knowing (2024-2025) – How does the accelerated pace of machine and computing time collide with evolutionary, celestial, and deep time? How can interdisciplinary humanities research help us understand what humans are in time with and how human pace is attuned?
- Slow Care (2025-2026) – How can we take better care of ourselves and others? Is pacing the key to intimacy, understanding, and repair? How are our cultural attitudes about care (and care labor) evident in our institutions and policies for healthcare, the environment, and labor rights?
- Slow Action (2026-2027) – How might the practices, methodologies, histories, and theories of collective organizing across communities and institutions provide insight for building values-rooted systems and deliberate actionable pathways that endure over time to support shared goals?