Professor Julia Bell's Inaugural Lecture: On Radical Attention
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
On Radical Attention
What does it mean to pay attention today? This lecture takes up Simone Weil's provocation that attention is 'the rarest and purest form of generosity'- a kind of secular prayer, and the true 'object of all studies'. Against the grain of contemporary life, with its currents of distraction, speed, and algorithmic mediation, I argue that attention is not a given but a practice: a muscle to be developed, a discipline that can be learned.
Drawing on creative writing workshops as laboratories of attention, I explore how the collective work of learning the arts of language - writing, reading, speaking, and listening - offers a form of resistance. The workshop, often dismissed as mere pedagogy or soft skill-building, emerges as a site of profound counter-cultural potential: a space where students learn to slow down, to notice what is overlooked, to listen beyond their own certainties. In an age when creativity is too often reduced to individual talent or measured as productivity, I reframe it as a shared practice of care - an ethical and emotional education as much as an aesthetic one.
This lecture extends the arguments developed in Radical Attention and Between the Lines, interrogating what the workshop teaches us about vulnerability, collaboration, and the sustaining power of communal attention. It asks whether the arts might yet offer something algorithms and AI cannot: the difficult, fragile, radical work of paying attention together.
Biography
Julia Bell is Professor of New Writing in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London where she convenes the MA in Creative Writing and is Project Director of the website MIROnline. She is the author of three novels, Massive, Dirty Work and most recently The Dark Light all published by Macmillan, the co-editor of the Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan) re-issued and updated in 2018.
Her essays and short stories have appeared in the TLS, The White Review, The Paris Review and have been broadcast on the BBC. Her essay-length book Radical Attention was published by Peninsula Press in 2021 and her most recent book Hymnal is a memoir in verse, published by Parthian in 2023.
You can read some of her work online at her website www.juliabell.net.
This inaugural lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Clore foyer.
Contact name: Chris Fray
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