Slow Knowing: The Pace of Being Human
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 examines 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 highlights how interdisciplinary humanities research can help us understand what humans are in time with, and how human pace is attuned.
This year, C21 offers 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, which we’ll then expand with our Story Cart
- 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 stretches across annual programming themes through our exhibitions
Featured Collaboratories
AI and the Humanities
The AI and the Humanities Collaboratory will consider 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 will cultivate an interdisciplinary creative space that examines the long duration of tree-time in the face of human and non-human interventions.