Call for abstracts: Ecology and the Art(-ifice) of Attention

A special issue of the journal Environmental Philosophy

General aim of the Special Issue

The Earth and its various ecosystems are changing under the pressure of environmental pollution and the rise of average global temperatures. Called ‘global weirding’ by some, these various processes have turned the Earth as we once knew it, or believed to know it, into a different place where we are trying to keep track of what is happening, represent it, make sense of it. In the Environmental Humanities, calls to ‘pay attention’, to cultivate an art of noticing, or to consider an ecology of attention have put forward ‘attention’ as something to be both diagnosed and reconsidered with respect to ecology and ecological politics.

In this special issue, we want to take stock of the different ways the concept of attention is being (or can be) mobilized in relation to ecology, and explore how attention relates to praxis in various forms (political, artistic, aesthetic,…). By exploring different calls to ‘pay attention’, the issue wants to bring forth the very gesture and artifice of it. Artifice is in no sense pejorative, but it is a term this special issue embraces in order to denaturalize practices and modes of attention. Paying attention requires a sound reflection on the various layers of mediation, from media technologies to narrative techniques, that allow attention to unfold. Placing ‘attention’ in the realm of politics and technique requires thinking the implications of what counts and what is neglected, and for whom.

The aim of this special issue is not to define attention or to appropriate the term academically, but rather to explore how ‘attention’ may serve as a lens to consider sensibility, perception, the crafting of concepts, and imaginative possibilities in times of ecological disruption.

‘Attention’: brief overview and dimensions to explore for the Special issue

Concerned with our current condition of living in the ruins of capitalism, Anna Tsing has argued for an ethnographic and political form of attention to resurgence and liveability in the ruins of a global capitalist economy and its damaged landscapes – an attention that she terms ‘the art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015: 17-25). This art, for Tsing, implies telling different stories – stories in the interstices of dominant political narratives about what the economy is supposed to be and how progress is defined. This seems close to what Isabelle Stengers (2015) means when she writes about the ‘art of paying attention’ in the double sense of learning to notice and being careful (“faire attention”).  The political stakes of attention lie in the consequences of the stories and relations we allow ourselves to imagine: what do they honor, what do they exclude, and how can we be more careful or do less damage than the blunt injunction of a political economy claiming that there are no alternatives? Partially influenced by the previous authors, Baptiste Morizot draws the contours of an ecological ethics by writing about animal tracking: a mode of attention that may contain the elements of a response to what Morizot terms our current ‘crisis of sensibility’ and our lack of awareness to the interdependence of human and non-human life (Morizot, 2022). These concerns are all the more pressing because we are living in an economy and media context in which our attention is a key commodity (Citton, 2017; Odell, 2019).

In these examples, ‘attention’ is clearly something that is more than, and qualitatively different from, the application of one’s mind to something (cognitive focus, concentration) as ‘attention’ is often used in its colloquial sense. It brings other connotations of the term into play that suggest care, precaution, imagination and – somehow – an engagement toward the possibility to become affected by what one is being attentive to. One specific dimension that we wish to explore in this issue is how attention relates to praxis. If the relation between knowledge and acting has become a common political trope, then what about the relation between attention and acting? Or between attention and non-acting?

A second and related dimension concerns the art(-ifice) of attention. Considering attention as a matter of art, technique and mediation allows reflecting on the preconditions and possibilities of attention (e.g. ‘the education of attention’ as termed by James Gibson, 2015 [1979]), but also its hidden assumptions. As Claire Bishop (2024) recently argued , attention has a political and gendered history rooted in the 19th century’s ‘optical and behavioural reorganization’ (p.13) in the arts (e.g. theatre) and in changing work patterns and labor tasks on the factory floor. The perceived lack of this particular form of attention, as well as forms of ‘distraction,’ invites moralizing judgement, medical diagnosis, and disciplinary technology, with clear class and gendered connotations. Denaturalizing attention allows asking what kind of attention is valued, and how deviation from that norm is considered unfit.

We seek contributions from researchers from various disciplines that engage with the relation between ecology and the art(-ifice) attention: philosophers, media studies scholars, cultural theorists, anthropologists, STS scholars, literary scholars, researchers in psychology and studies of cognition, etc.

Possible topics include:

-  Which kind of relation between human and non-human life do certain modes of attention imply? How do they challenge prevailing conceptions of ‘nature’?

-  Is there a dominant ‘economy of attention’ (Citton, 2009) to be countered by other forms of attention with respect to environmental concerns? What are the possible articulations between attention and resistance?

-  What is the role of various media technologies and platforms in limiting or fostering forms of attention for environmental concerns?

-  To which extent is the art of paying attention always a collective practice or an ‘ecology of practices’?

-  What are practical examples of collective forms of attention that have reshaped, or are reshaping, the way an environmental problem is conceived and made actionable?

-  How can narratives of walking (Solnit, 2001) or accounts of alternative living and exploring  display a new art of paying attention?

-  How is attention more than a state or focus of mind? How does it imply bodily or technological mediation (Cubitt, 2017; Latour and Weibel, eds., 2020, Ingold, 2021)?

-  Are there forms of attention that we have unlearned? Are there historical traces of other forms of attention?

If you are interested in writing a contribution, please send an abstract (approx. 500 words) by December 30th 2024 to: khendrickx@uliege.be and s.w.m.de.cauwer@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Invitations to submit a full paper: Jan 15th 2025. Submission deadline for full papers: June 30th 2025. Prospective papers should be prepared for peer review and maximally 5000-8000 words in length, inclusive of notes; they should be formatted using footnotes, American spellings and punctuation, and following the Chicago Manual of Style. The special issue is scheduled to appear in the Spring of 2026.

References cited:

Bishop, Claire (2024),Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, New York: Verso.

Citton, Yves (2017), The Ecology of Attention, trans. Barnaby Norman, Cambridge: Polity.

Cubitt, Sean (2017), Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, Durham: Duke UP.

Gibson, J. (2015 [1979]) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London: Routledge.

Ingold, Tim (2021), Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence, London: Routledge.

Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter, eds. (2020), Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, ZKM, Center for Art And Media Karlsruhe and the MIT Press.

Morizot, Baptiste (2022), Ways of Being Alive, trans. Andrew Brown, Cambridge: Polity.

Odell, Jenny (2019), How to do nothing: resisting the attention economy, New York: Ballantine Books.

Solnit, Rebecca (2001), Wanderlust. A History of Walking, London: Penguin Books.

Stengers, Isabelle (2015), In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey, Open Humanities Press.

Tsing, Anna (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton UP.

About the Guest Editors:

Stijn De Cauwer is Assistant Professor  at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Kim Hendrickx is FNRS Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Liège, Belgium.