From February 4–6, the UWC‑USA community paused regular classes to participate in “Attention, Please!,” our 2026 Annual Conference hosted by UWC-USA’s Bartos Institute for the Constructive Engagement of Conflict. The gathering brought together current students, faculty and staff, alumni, and over 100 students from schools across the region to explore how our attention is shaped, sold, and reclaimed in today’s “attention economy.” Partnering with the Strother School of Radical Attention, the conference planners designed a program that alternated between whole‑community keynotes and small‑group “practices of attention,” inviting participants to slow down, listen closely, and connect the theme to daily life on campus.
Interim Head of School Andrew Mahlstedt described the conference as a reminder that attention is not just an individual discipline but “fundamentally about community‑building.” While some sessions examined technology and social media, the deeper focus was on how we can sit together, notice together, and choose where we direct our minds and hearts. In one practice Andrew co‑facilitated, a student group spent 16 minutes by the Gallinas River that runs along the campus cycling through four ways of “looking” at the same bridge—with and without their phones—and then sharing what they noticed and felt. Similar workshops and sessions around campus invited students to explore the following questions: What habits derail my attention? What environments help me be fully present? How can I reclaim my attention as a personal and collective right?
By the end of the conference, students left not only with new language for thinking about cognitive capitalism and the ethics of attention, but also with concrete ideas for how to live and learn more intentionally at UWC‑USA.