“People talk about the attention economy—when you deprive someone of your attention, you’re depriving them of a livelihood.” – Lisa Nakamura
This online panel will discuss the role of attention for racial justice. Our attention is one of today’s most valued commodities. We live in an attention economy, where our capacities to pay attention are of interest to pedagogy, the market, and even warfare. Increasingly subject to technological interference, what we pay attention to and how is not only a psychological, physiological, and techno-scientific question, but also a deeply social and political one.
Bringing together scholars from media theory, communication studies, political science, law, and art, the panelists will discuss the racialized dimensions of technology and data collections. The conversation will peruse who shapes the technologies and platforms of the attention economy and their underlying codes, and for whose benefit and detriment. Together, they will consider rage, spectatorship, and activism as well as the power of paying and withholding attention for social justice.
We will be joined by Sonali Chakravarti, whose research focuses on how our moral education has taught us to value the role of the impartial spectator and in what ways this shapes our relationship with anger and justice. In her book Sing the Rage, Chakravarti examines this question by looking at the aftermath of the atrocities of apartheid in South Africa through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–1998). Sarah J. Jackson explores how media, journalism, and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics, and how communication arising from Black, feminist, and activist spaces contributes to US progress. Lisa Nakamura will share her knowledge from her decades-long studies on the intersection of digital media and race, gender, and sexuality, and, more recently, on the power of cancel culture. The panel will be chaired by Stefanie Hessler, director of Kunsthall Trondheim, and curator working on questions of technology and ecology from an intersectional feminist perspective. A short audio intervention titled How Deep is My Love? by the artist Isabel Lewis will start out the conversation, and an excerpt of Arthur Jafa’s film Love is the Message, The Message is Death (Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels) will conclude the panel.
The panel Race, Power, and the Politics of Attention is co-hosted by Kunsthall Trondheim as part of the workshop “Attention – History, Philosophy, Science” organized by Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science and the Davis Center. The workshop aims to historicize and conceptually interrogate the attention economy via interdisciplinary inquiry.
Click here to register for free for the Zoom webinar.
More information on the workshop can be found here.
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Participant biographies:
Sonali Chakravarti is Associate Professor of Government, Wesleyan University. Her work on justice, in its restorative, retributive and transformative forms has focused on truth commissions, post-genocide justice, and the American jury system. Chakravarti is the author of Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence (2014) and Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (2019). Her article “Wanted: Angela Davis and a Jury of Her Peers” is forthcoming in Political Theory. In addition to scholarly journals, her writing has appeared in Jacobin, the Nation, Salon, and Boston Review.
Sarah J. Jackson is Presidential Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania and Co-Director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center, University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. A 2020 Carnegie Fellow, she studies how media, journalism, and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics. She is the author of Black Celebrity, Racial Politics and the Press (2014) and #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (2020), and serves as an editor or board member at Communication Theory, Woman’s Studies in Communication, and Political Communication. Jackson also serves of the advisory boards of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the Social Science Research Council’s MediaWell project.
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Digital Studies Institute and the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on race, gender, and the Internet, most recently Racist Zoombombing (Routledge, 2021, co-authored with Hanah Stiverson and Kyle Lindsey) and Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2020, as Precarity Lab).
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on ecologies, technology, and expanded definitions of life and non-life from an intersectional feminist perspective. Hessler is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, curator of the 17th MOMENTA Biennale in Montreal (2021), and visiting research scholar at Westminster University in London. Recent curatorial projects include “Down to Earth” at the Gropius Bau/Berliner Festspiele, Berlin (2020); “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at Ocean Space, Venice (2019); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018); and with D. Graham Burnett the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018). Her monographic book Prospecting Ocean was published by The MIT Press and TBA21–Academy in 2019.
Arthur Jafa is an artist and filmmaker. He first gained worldwide attention in 2016 with his film Love is the Message, the Message is Death, combining viral videos found on the internet, historical footage of black American politicians and celebrities, and videos of police brutality against black Americans.
Isabel Lewis is a Dominican-American artist based in Berlin since 2009. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, Lewis created the format she calls hosted occasions that are immersive experiences including assemblages of dances, sounds, smells, and decor in heteroptopic spaces of social encounter. Lewis’s work has been presented internationally by theaters, music festivals, and contemporary art institutions including Tanz Im August at the Hebbel Theather (HAU 1) in Berlin, Kunsthalle Basel, Tate Modern in London, Dia Foundation in New York, and Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai, among others.