UWC-USA will welcome more than 100 visiting students and educators to campus this weekend for the 2026 Annual Conference, “Attention Please!,” a two-and-a-half day exploration of how attention shapes our inner lives, our relationships, and our engagement with the world. Grounded in the UWC mission, the conference invites participants to slow down, listen closely, and leave with concrete action plans for living and learning more intentionally in their home schools and communities.
Hosted by UWC-USA’s Bartos Institute for the Constructive Engagement of Conflict, this year’s conference centers on cohort-based “attention labs” designed and led by facilitators from the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn. Across three themed presentations—Ecology, Economy, and Sanctuary—students and faculty will connect the practice of attention to questions of environmental responsibility, social and economic justice, and the creation of spaces of refuge and care.
The event will open on Wednesday evening with a keynote presentation by historian and writer D. Graham Burnett, a professor of history and the history of science at Princeton University and director of the Strother School of Radical Attention. Burnett, co-editor of the forthcoming Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, has helped shape international conversations about how we attend to technology, culture, and one another. The conference will close on Friday with a conversation and performance by pianist and filmmaker James Carson, whose long-term “Cabin Music” project offers a meditative, multilayered approach to listening and presence.