Currently reading Burnett & Mitchell (2025): “Attention sanctuaries: Social practice guidelines and emergent strategies in attention activism”
I had not come across the term “attention sanctuaries” before, but somehow it spoke to me. There are so many things constantly competing for attention and I often find it difficult to resist the emails that would just take a minute (or five) to respond to, the article I could quickly read, the podcast I could listen to while walking to an appointment, … And many people describe the detrimental effects of being online 24/7. So what would it mean to have an attention sanctuary?
Burnett & Mitchell (2025) suggest five steps to collaboratively figure out guidelines for an attention sanctuary:
- Establish core attention values. What kind of attention do we want to pay to what in the sanctuary?
- Consider the sanctuary environment. Where is it, what makes it comfortable, who cares for it?
- Consider attentional “freedom from”. What are the kind of things that eat up our attention that we want to eliminate, and how can we do that in our sanctuary?
- Consider attentional “freedom to”. What do we actually want to pay attention to, who do we want to invite in, how can we set up the sanctuary to facilitate that?
- Draft your guidelines together
I can see so many applications for this! Examples that they give are meetings where phones are in airplane mode and laptops are closed (and it should be possible to figure out how to do this in a way that everybody still has access to the agenda and shared notes when desirable, it is not like everybody needs to be constantly online!), or dinners prepared together and walks taken together instead of driving. In a way, our sit spot practice is its own little attention sanctuary, too. It will be really interesting to explore this more in practice!
Burnett, D. G., & Mitchell, E. (2025). Attention sanctuaries: Social practice guidelines and emergent strategies in attention activism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1546(1), 5-10.
