UMass Boston

This initiative was devised in response to the growing crisis in attention that has overtaken most areas of our lives, including in university classrooms and research spaces. The College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office, in partnership with the Applied Ethics Center and the Center for Humanities, Culture, and Society, has launched a three-part initiative to educate the community about attention and encourage people to reengage with it.

As the screen-filled world continues to take center stage, our focus gets fractured, pulled, directed, and manipulated in digital media spaces. This can be considered the cost of an attention economy in which human attention is the precious, monetized resource, including in classrooms and research spaces.

In response to this trend, the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office, in partnership with the Applied Ethics Center and the Center for Humanities, Culture, and Society, has launched an initiative to educate about and engage with attention and attention spans.

“Attention is the necessary precondition for learning, connecting, and being able to imagine and create–really for existing as a full human in our world. The tech and business worlds understand the monetary value of our attention, which is why it is the source of such fierce competition. The goal of The Attention Project is both to educate ourselves about this attentional crisis, and to provide experiences, communities, and spaces in which we can reignite the ability to focus that is behind all important research, all new ideas, and all great pedagogy,” said Eve Sorum, professor of English and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, who is spearheading The Attention Project at UMass Boston.

The initiative contains three parts spread throughout the 2026-27 academic year, including The One Page Project, The Deep Read: A CLA Seminar, and the CLA Dean Speaker Series. More on these individual parts is below. 

The One Page Project:

The One Page Project is a series of six events over the fall and spring semesters where a faculty member from a different CLA department will lead a discussion of a short piece of text from their discipline. The faculty member leading the discussion will engage with the attendees in an hour-long, focused reading and discussion of that one page. The fall lineup includes faculty from Philosophy, History, and Sociology.

Photo from a recent One Page Project event. 

CLA 100: The Deep Read: A CLA Seminar:

Students in any CLA major can earn credit in this intimate, discussion-driven, one-credit seminar. The seminar meets for one hour each week, during which participants center their collective attention on a single hard copy of a book, art object, or important document, reading it slowly, carefully, and with curiosity. Students will learn how to analyze ideas with depth and nuance, how to listen attentively, how to ask better questions, and how to build meaning collaboratively. CLA faculty piloted three sections of this seminar in fall 2026, teaching Virgil’s Aeneid, Viriginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. 

Fall and Spring Keynote Speakers:

On October 8th, Peter Schmidt, director of the Strother School of Radical Attention and co-editor of the manifesto Attensity!, gave a talk on “Attention Activism and Future Schools,” which drew a large audience of students, faculty, and staff. You can view a video of this talk here. Schmidt highlighted the central connection between the “attention arts” and the liberal arts. After this talk, Schmidt met over lunch with a smaller group of faculty who had read Attensity! to discuss the pedagogical implications of attention activism work. The spring keynote speaker will be Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span. The date is to be determined.

“I am thrilled by the enthusiasm of both students and faculty for this initiative–people are hungry for experiences that ask them to put away their devices and read, think, and engage with each other about ideas and words,” said Sorum. “I see this moment, as difficult as it is for educational institutions in the face of myriad political, attentional, and financial challenges, as one that can bring us back to the necessity of reflecting on, as Chancellor Suárez-Orozco memorably said in his introductory remarks at the recent “Ethics and the Future of Artificial Intelligence” event, what defines us as human: struggle, agency, and the ability to choose and decide. None of those are possible without reclaiming attention, and all three are at the heart of a university education.”

For more information about The Attention Project and its upcoming events, visit CLA’s student resources website.

Upcoming Events:

Thursday, October 29th, 1:30 - 2:30 p.m.: Liza McCahill (History) will read a page from Machiavelli’s The Prince

Tuesday, November 17th, 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.: Evan Stewart (Sociology) will read a page from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Spring Keynote Speaker (date TBD): Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span.