The Struggle for Attention in Public Sphere – A Perspective of Critical Phenomenology

The Struggle for Attention in the Public Sphere

A Perspective of Critical Phenomenology

International Summer School, July 23 – 29, 2023

Attention does not deserve to be treated merely as one phenomenon among others; it is a key phenomenon which discloses experience in a unique fashion.

Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien (2011)

About the Summer School
Aims and Scopes
Contact
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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.

Aims and Scopes

The aim of our Summer School is to analyze the functions and goals of articulating attention in the public sphere.

The questions we would like to discuss are:

How our perception of things in the public sphere depends on the logic of (re)distribution of public attention?
How (re)articulation of attention constitutes and reconstitutes social and political order?
How limits of the public sphere change depending on the (re)distribution of public attention?
How media form „actual“ and „essential“ agenda through articulation of public attention?

Organisation and Application

We invite participants who are PhD students and postdocs from the field of social and political philosophy/critical phenomenology as well as from art-, cultural-, public history-, literary-, and media studies. The program of the School consists of lectures, seminars, workshops and discussions and includes visits to the museums of Dresden and a natural reserve in Saxon Switzerland.

The School takes place at TU Dresden, Institute of Slavic studies from 23 to 29 July 2023. It is organized by the Department of Slavic Literatures at the Institute for Slavic Studies. The working language will be English.

Travel and accommodation costs can be covered by the University of Dresden.

Please, send us a CV and a brief (not more than two pages) description of how the School relates to your research interests till the 1st of May 2023:

Any questions about the summer school can be addressed to: