Deadline: May 1, 2023
Call for Participation for the International Summer School “The Struggle for Attention in Public Sphere. A Perspective of Critical Phenomenology”, July 23 – 29, 2023, University of Dresden (Germany), organized by Professor Klavdia Smola, Dr. Tatiana Vaizer, and Dr. Annelie Bachmaier.
About the Summer School
In our summer school we understand the public sphere as a public space (or spaces) where socially, culturally and politically meaningful events and processes take place. But what makes them „meaningful“? And what makes them „public“? In order to produce a meaningful event or an action, do we need attract the attention of the public to this event or action? Why do we consider some events as meaningful and leave others aside as insignificant? How is attention distributed and redistributed in the public sphere and what instances are responsible for that? In what cases do we become hostages of the economics of attention and how does paying attention to some things and not paying it to others form our identity?
We can imagine modern human history as a permanent struggle for attention in the public sphere. The struggle could take place in order for one group to gain more power or more influence, or, on the contrary, in order to restore social or political injustice and to attract attention to an unfairly marginalized group. If attention is a means of making something or someone visible in the public sphere and, thus, existing, isn’t the articulation of attention also a means to undermine hegemonies, to redistribute power in a society in a fairer way?
Detailed information about the conception and application of our project you can find here: