ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO https://youtu.be/mjzH8OGIef8?si=uq4IQ4TN7l-zCqyA Lecture | Marion Thain
Marion Thain | Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute
Professor, Culture and Technology | University of Edinburgh
"Attention Studies: Configuring a New 'Interdisciplinary Discipline'"
Distraction is experienced as one of the key challenges of our time. Digital distractions have been blamed for everything up to and including the destruction of democracy. How can universities rise to the challenge of providing a research base for exploring the concept of attention? Every discipline studies attention in some form or another. Psychology, neurobiology and psychiatry study systems of attention within the brain and the person. Social science, and humanities disciplines study the politics, sociologies and cultural workings of attention. The arts explore how different art forms manipulate attention differently and for different ends. All of these disciplines use radically different methodologies in their exploration of attention and all explore different facets of the same attention system. So, what happens if we try to bring all of this together to articulate a new 'interdisciplinary discipline' of Attention Studies, capable of addressing key challenges from a deep and united research base? That's the aim of a new project I'm developing with Oxford University press: one which brings together innovative publishing methods with a new approach to working across disciplines. This talk outlines the project, working through some of the decisions involved and exploring how new ways of interdisciplinary working and publishing are essential for enabling us to make a step change in response to some of the most pressing problems we are experiencing.
00:00 CMBC Introduction - Dietrich Stout
02:56 Speaker Introduction - Dietrich Stout
05:34 Lecture by Marion Thain
55:06 Q&A session