Slow Knowing

About C21’s 2024-25 Theme

Slow movements—across food, cities, science, scholarship and more—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 21^st century social, political, and ecological challenges. With humanities scholars, in partnership with community leaders, C21 examined how slow knowing facilitates the long-term envisioning and consistency of action required to carefully support the flourishing of diverse communities, cultures, and ecosystems. As the accelerated pace of machine and computing time collides with evolutionary, celestial, and deep time, our 2024-2025 programming highlighted how interdisciplinary humanities research can help us understand what humans are in time with, and how human pace is attuned. 

During the 2024-25 academic year, C21 offered multiple points of access and honors multiple ways of knowing by: 

• Introducing a range of slow knowing across disciplines, histories, and cultures on our “6.5 Minutes With…” podcasts 
• Exploring human pace in relation to technology and ecology through our C21 Spring Lecture, as well as talks and events in association with our two main C21-funded Collaboratory Projects: “AI and the Humanities” and “Slow Growing and the Time of Trees” in addition to our numerous Working Groups 
• Engaging our Milwaukee community on and off campus on issues of attention with an experiential workshop
• Supporting slow humanities research methodologies through our Fellows program, in addition to a UW System Faculty Lecture Series in collaboration with UW Madison’s Center for the Humanities 
• Presenting ongoing scholarly and community-engaged research that stretched across annual programming themes through our exhibitions 

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Slow Digest

Slow Digest was our weekly digital publication that celebrated and supplemented slow knowing, C21’s 2024-2025 theme. Some editions of the Slow Digest featured essays, insights, and annotations from C21 staff and stakeholders. Others consisted of a collection of recommendations for further reading, curated around a particular slow topic.

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  Slow Digest: AI, Environmental Problem or Miracle Solution?February 25, 2026

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  Slow Digest: More Than A FeelingFebruary 18, 2026

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  Slow Digest: Nathaniel SternFebruary 11, 2026

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Featured Collaboratories

AI and the Humanities

The AI and the Humanities Collaboratory considered one of the most pressing questions for higher education: what is the future of humanities in the context of AI?

Slow Growing in the time of Trees

The Slow Growing in the Time of Trees Collaboratory cultivated an interdisciplinary creative space that examined the long duration of tree-time in the face of human and non-human interventions.

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Events

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C21’s Slow Knowing programming was supported in part by the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.