Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Keynote lecture by Professor Yves Citton
4 June 2026
How do increasing demands on our attention influence what we know, and how we act, in response to climate change? Despite a strong scientific consensus that climate change is ongoing and anthropogenic, political and legal action remains fragmented. Ecologies of Care asks to what extent the environmental crisis is a crisis of attention. Speaking to the dynamics of the attention economy, Yves Citton notes that “the new scarcity is no longer to be situated on the side of material goods to be produced, but on the attention necessary to consume them.” The word ‘attention’ is etymologically linked to the notion of care, or that which one attends to. This relationship (of subject and object) is fundamentally collective, insofar as collective attentional regimes influence what each one of us pays attention to on a daily basis, and how we navigate the barrage of informational flows from popular media.
Terms such as "the Anthropocene" and "planetary boundaries" function both as scientific descriptors and attempts to provoke action commensurate to the urgency that scientists believe their research demonstrates. The recent decision not to formalize the Anthropocene as an official geological unit, for example, highlights growing unease concerning intensifying media attention directed at scientific expertise. Under conditions of increasing disparity between what we know, and how we act, in response to climate change, the role of scientific expertise plays an increasingly normative, and not only informative, function. Scientific expertise attempts to direct what we attend to, and consequently, how (or if) we care. This is a collective practice of narrating and internalizing mythologies, whereby informational flows draw attention to some thing that needs to be cared for: Earth, the planetary, capital, or each other.
The environmental crisis, in other words, is a symptom of a generalized crisis of attentiveness, pushing attention to new thresholds that result in novel methods of managing and regulating perception. A generalized notion of ecology, attending not simply to the environment, but to information, capital, and the sociotechnical, requires new approaches beyond disciplinary boundaries. This two-day conference inaugurates the Law and the Environmental Humanities Network, a new initiative between the Environmental Humanities Hub and the Law and the Humanities Hub of the School of Advanced Study; and the Technosocial Ecologies Group of the Centre for Critical Thought at Kent Law School. Our objective is to build an international network of scholars, scientists, policy actors, and artists working across law, ecology, technology, attention, and care.
Keynote lecture by Professor Yves Citton
4 June 2026
How do increasing demands on our attention influence what we know, and how we act, in response to climate change? Despite a strong scientific consensus that climate change is ongoing and anthropogenic, political and legal action remains fragmented. Ecologies of Care asks to what extent the environmental crisis is a crisis of attention. Speaking to the dynamics of the attention economy, Yves Citton notes that “the new scarcity is no longer to be situated on the side of material goods to be produced, but on the attention necessary to consume them.” The word ‘attention’ is etymologically linked to the notion of care, or that which one attends to. This relationship (of subject and object) is fundamentally collective, insofar as collective attentional regimes influence what each one of us pays attention to on a daily basis, and how we navigate the barrage of informational flows from popular media.
Terms such as "the Anthropocene" and "planetary boundaries" function both as scientific descriptors and attempts to provoke action commensurate to the urgency that scientists believe their research demonstrates. The recent decision not to formalize the Anthropocene as an official geological unit, for example, highlights growing unease concerning intensifying media attention directed at scientific expertise. Under conditions of increasing disparity between what we know, and how we act, in response to climate change, the role of scientific expertise plays an increasingly normative, and not only informative, function. Scientific expertise attempts to direct what we attend to, and consequently, how (or if) we care. This is a collective practice of narrating and internalizing mythologies, whereby informational flows draw attention to some thing that needs to be cared for: Earth, the planetary, capital, or each other.
The environmental crisis, in other words, is a symptom of a generalized crisis of attentiveness, pushing attention to new thresholds that result in novel methods of managing and regulating perception. A generalized notion of ecology, attending not simply to the environment, but to information, capital, and the sociotechnical, requires new approaches beyond disciplinary boundaries. This two-day conference inaugurates the Law and the Environmental Humanities Network, a new initiative between the Environmental Humanities Hub and the Law and the Humanities Hub of the School of Advanced Study; and the Technosocial Ecologies Group of the Centre for Critical Thought at Kent Law School. Our objective is to build an international network of scholars, scientists, policy actors, and artists working across law, ecology, technology, attention, and care.
