MCSI Series Explores Evolution of Paying Attention

Is our attention span deteriorating? Is our attention being commodified and fracked by our increasing addiction to smart phones and social media? Have we lost valuable habits of mind that could serve us in social, political, and environmental crises? Pitzer College’s Munroe Center for Social Inquiry (MCSI) is confronting these questions in the fall 2025 lecture series, “Cultivating Attention.” The series is free and open to the Claremont Colleges community.

The MCSI seminar and associated speaker series place recent treatments of the subject of attention in a dialogue with its longer intellectual history and recent interdisciplinary scholarship.

The series will consider questions like: 

• What do philosophers and scientists think attention is?
• How do conceptions of attention through history and across cultures compare?
• To what extent do technologies change and reflect the nature of our attention?
• How does our attention shift during aesthetic experiences with art or nature?
• Are we directing our attention in ways that serve us well?

Alexandra Hui, an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, will kick off the series with a talk on September 12 at 2:45 p.m. at Avery Hall 201. Hui will discuss how sound and listening helped develop modern conceptions of the environment in the U.S. One example is early 20th-century efforts to collect the voices of vanishing species and use these wild-recorded sounds of nature in radio programming, contributing to an association of silence with extinction. Hui will explore the consequences of putting nature sounds to work, including the backgroundification of the non-built environment.

Other speakers this fall will include scholars from San Francisco State University, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of California, Merced.

The Munroe Center for Social Inquiry is named after two of Pitzer’s founding faculty: the late Robert “Lee” and Ruth Hagberg Munroe. Each academic year, the MCSI pursues interdisciplinary learning and public inquiry as embodied by these beloved faculty members. Professor of Cognitive Science Timothy Justus is the 2025–26 MCSI director.

Learn more about the MCSI fall 2025 series.