Marion Thain

This website is a hub for our project that aims to build the interdisciplinary field of ‘Attention Studies’. Based at King’s College London, the project is bringing together a network of partners from across the globe. In this first blog post, I am asking what it would mean to think of Attention Studies not just as a multi- and interdisciplinary field, but as a new interdisciplinary discipline. This is in part a thought-experiment, but does also signal something of the ambition of the project.

Many of our academic disciplines have long and eminent histories. Some have shorter but equally esteemed lineages. My own Faculty of Arts and Humanities, for example, contains both the centuries-old discipline of philosophy, and newcomers from the past couple of decades such as Digital Humanities. In both cases, these disciplines have distinctive content-focus and also methodologies that are recognisable and more or less established.

What does it mean then to think about what we are calling Attention Studies as, potentially, a discipline? The knowledge project we are undertaking here has four main axes: concept, content, method, and infrastructure. It is by mapping our endeavours along all four of these axes that we are attempting to effect a small but perceptible shift in the tectonic plates of knowledge-formation.

The first axis refers to the work needed to carve out a common conceptual model and language for attention. How can we articulate a model of attention that will provide the  basis for a common conversation across the disciplines? How can we ensure we are using terminology in ways that translate across our fields, with shared understanding? This foundational work requires the project to draw from across the disciplines, to synthesise, and also to create.

The second axis refers to the various questions and issues that fall within the parameters of the field. This might commonly be a thematic taxonomy, but we are trying a different approach by drawing our taxonomy from the real-world problems we need the field to address. This approach is designed to reverse-engineer the creation of a discipline: rather than identifying a field, studying it and then thinking about what use that research can be in the world, we are taking the problems that need to be solved and allowing them to help determine the shape of the field.

The third axis is one of methodology: the multi-disciplinary methods we are bringing together around the focal content.  This is what we are looking to represent through the key methods and concepts page of this website, where we will be collecting indicative extracts from key texts from the various different disciplines that we are bringing together around this field. In addition to that mapping of the methodological field, we are running various projects that actively attempt to bring those methods into dialogue and to test out our ability to work across them in collaboration.

The fourth axis is one that considers institutional and disciplinary infrastructures. The ways in which we organise knowledge are not unchanging, but can sometimes feel slow to change, and this must be in key part because they are enshrined in the organisation of our institutional knowledge-spaces. Universities extol the virtues of interdisciplinarity to our graduate students, but when they come to apply for an academic position they usually need not just to fit squarely within a discipline, but centrally within an established subfield of a discipline. How can we encourage graduate students to undertake truly innovative work that crosses boundaries when we know this risks marginalising them on the job market? Our monograph publishers and journal editors also tend to structure their lists along disciplinary lines, and even when welcoming interdisciplinary work that interdisciplinarity is often between neighbouring disciplines rather than more broadly construed. Our funding councils, also, while encouraging interdisciplinary work still sit broadly within disciplinary areas.

How might building the field of Attention Studies act as an experiment in the creation of a space of intellectual inquiry that, while building on disciplinary expertise, genuinely sits outside of the usual disciplinary boundaries? Working out how to configure such knowledge-spaces institutionally is crucial both to ensuring that all disciplinary partners can meet as equals, and that we can supplement ‘centre and periphery’ models of interdisciplinarity, and ‘two (or three) partners’ models of interdisciplinarity, with modes of enquiry that can draw a wide variety of partners together on fresh ground. Such a vision aims not just to develop but to transform, and requires a change in our articulation of the relationship between the frames within which we operate and our intellectual ambitions.

Crucially, by opening up properly interdisciplinary spaces that become structurally rooted, might we have the potential to rethink the power dynamics and historical legacies baked into our current knowledge infrastructures? How might the experiment of building a new ‘discipline’ offer opportunities for shifting bias that is structurally encoded within our institutional frames? Embedding collaboration across greater disciplinary breadth (a foundational principle of this project) is already demanding fresh structures to enable that conversation, and is already opening up a receptivity to how things could be otherwise. The project’s radical interdisciplinary is fostering a self-awareness of disciplinary histories and paradigms that I hope will send out broader ripples. The ambitions of this project are centrally, of course, in relation to the study of attention, but I hope it will also help establish new paradigms for cross-disciplinary working and for understanding and reframing the dynamics of history, power, and culture within and across institutional knowledge structures.