COVID Response: All in-person and/or online programming will adapt with the most current health guidelines.
Fighting for Your Attention, Stealing Away Your Time: How to Survive in a Distracted World and How Did We Get Here?
Time & Location
About The Event
Through the course of four meetings, Dr. Marianna Orlandi and Dr. Kevin Stuart will explore and discuss the attention problem of today. First, our scholars will engage in a philosophical and epistemological analysis of the sources of the problem, one which connects our distraction problem with a very modern and post-Enlightenment conception of human freedom.
They will then examine and review some practical tips and tricks, which might help us all refocus our attention, take back possession of our time, and act again as coherent moral agents. These reflections will be largely based on the brilliant and recent works by Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond your Head, and by Cal Newport, Deep Work.
This compact seminar will also inaugurate a new initiative of AI: Disconnected & Refocused Fridays (DRF). Click here for more information!
About our Speakers:
Dr. Kevin Stuart, Ph.D.
Executive Director of the Austin Institute
Kevin E. Stuart is the executive director of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family & Culture. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin where he studied public law and political philosophy, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. He earned a Master of Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science after receiving undergraduate degrees in history and English literature from Louisiana State University. He is the editor of the Catholicism & Society book series for the Society for Catholic Social Scientists (Franciscan University Press).
Marianna Orlandi, Avv., Ph.D.
Associate Director of Academic Programs of the Austin Institute
Marianna Orlandi received her Ph.D. in Law from the University of Padua, Italy, and from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Prior to moving to Texas, she was a 2019-2020 James Madison Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. She was admitted to the Italian bar in 2015 after graduating magna cum laude from the University of Padua. She practiced as a criminal lawyer in Milan and worked in the United States as a policy research analyst. Her interests and research focus on issues of life, and on its legal and international protection, in particular through the lens of criminal law.