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 21st 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
C21’s Slow Knowing programming was supported in part by the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership.