My Experience at the School of Radical Attention

This past weekend I made my way to Brooklyn from Toronto to attend two full days of workshops at the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA).

If you’ve not heard of SoRA, it’s a non-profit formed in the past couple years that’s raising awareness about our relationship to attention, how disruptive technological forces have reshaped and commodified our attention, and what we can do as a collective to regain dominion over it in all its varied forms.

SoRA runs Attention Labs. These are workshops led by facilitators who guide participants through a series of ‘Practices of Attention’. The purpose is to highlight and engage with forms of attention that can’t be commodified. These ways of paying attention are less common for us in our day-to-day lives and so are both novel and sometimes even uncomfortable.

After engaging in a practice, you’ll sit in a circle with the other participants, share your experiences, and engage in a discussion. As the facilitators say, this is where the magic happens. Listening is where attention really shines.

During this past weekend SoRA also hosted their first ever ‘Train the Trainer’ workshops. These helped participants learn how to run their own Attention Labs to bring back to their communities. Facilitation is not something I’ve done a lot of in my life, but the space and everyone in it was so encouraging that I felt really comfortable as I led a few small groups through some Practices of Attention.

While SoRA is young and small, it’s fantastically well-run and well-thought out. There’s a strong philosophical and socioeconomic underpinning to everything they teach and do. The facilitators were highly engaging, warm, patient, and just really fun. And SoRA’s space (which they call an Attention Sanctuary) in DUMBO is beautiful.

What’s also incredible is that all these workshops were free to attend.

(They do often some courses that are paid. I signed up for a three-week Attention Activism 101 online course that’s been tremendous so far.)

If you’re starting to question social media + Big Tech and how they’ve reshaped your attention for their benefit and your detriment, SoRA is a great entry point to explore this further.