At the beginning of the current academic year, the Franco Institute launched its sixth annual research theme: “Attention.” In addition to awarding grants to faculty and graduate students, the Institute will host the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium on April 10, 2026, which takes up the attention theme by asking the speakers “How should we hold attention?”
Over the past year, the Institute awarded nineteen Annual Research Theme grants to faculty and graduate students in the College of Arts & Letters. With the Franco Institute’s support, scholars in anthropology; art, art history, and design; English; peace studies; political science; psychology; Romance Languages and Literatures; sociology; the Technology and Digital Studies Program; and theology are researching diverse locales—including Kenya, Brazil, the Philippines, Mexico, Turkey, and Nepal—as well as South Bend.
Six projects deal directly with the so-called “attention economy” and how digital technologies affect and monetize human attention. These projects examine how technology—from TikTok and AI to social media algorithms—actively reshapes, fragments, or undermines attention. Abigail Hemmen, a doctoral candidate in political science, examines how intermingling news headlines with non-news content on social media feeds can trivialize politics. Taking a global perspective, political science and peace studies graduate student Ali Altiok studies how Kenyan youth confront AI-generated political disinformation and deepfakes in order to assess the efficacy of targeted digital literacy education. In a similar vein, Gessica de Freitas, another graduate student in political science, studies how informational overload in Brazil’s complex electoral systems undermines voters’ democratic focus and memory. From a psychological lens, graduate student Lauren Garner investigates the extent to which TikTok may be negatively influencing sustained attention and contrasts those effects with guided meditation practices. Alexi Orchard, an assistant teaching professor in the Technology and Digital Studies Program, proposes that people could seek to emulate generative AI’s capability of processing long text sequences while preserving context. For Orchard, humanities-led expertise can help to develop deep context and evidence-based reasoning rather than accepting superficial or misleading information without much scrutiny. Putting these concerns into practice, associate professor of studio art Jason Lahr translates the “mire of memes” and the experience of “doomscrolling” into the slow, contemplative practice of painting. Lahr is preparing this work for upcoming exhibitions.
Three grantees in psychology focus on the internal mechanics of attention: how it is controlled, how it fails, and how its dysregulation leads to adverse psychological outcomes. Psychology professor Brad Gibson researches whether chronic boredom reflects an impaired voluntary “internal attention” and is developing a model to measure this untested hypothesis. The question of what happens from too much attention is the question that Ryan Carpenter, assistant professor of psychology, seeks to answer. Carpenter explores how an “over-focus on reward” may act as a common link between addiction and nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). Psychology graduate student Aurora Roghair investigates the link between environmental lead exposure and ADHD in South Bend-area children. Her study will provide home lead-testing kits to caregivers and her findings can inform community-based screening and early detection.
A few scholars cast attention in terms of its implications for power, justice, and institutions. Their projects treat attention as a political resource and investigate who is granted "regard" and whose suffering is systematically ignored or silenced. The “moral economy of care” within Nepal’s medical system is the focus of anthropology graduate student Prakash B K’s research into clinical attention through twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork. Collective memory and media depictions feature heavily in graduate research from Giulia Maria Gliozzi in Italian Studies and Fabían Díaz Maldonado in sociology. Gliozzi examines how postwar institutions in Italy directed public attention away from specific Holocaust testimonies. Maldonado considers attention within the context of media portrayals, asking how partisan media frame certain social movements to be deemed “worthy” of public attention. Through this work, Gliozzi and Maldonado advance our understanding of attention’s role in conditioning public responses to public memory and collective action.
Other scholars pick up on these themes and investigate attention in relation to memory, resilience, and cultural witness. They focus on how marginalized or threatened communities "attend" to their history, community, language, and shared identity to survive erasure or crisis. Diasporas are the focal point for both Insha Bint Bashir, a graduate student in anthropology, and Jorge Manuel Arredondo Sevilla in theology. Bashir examines how Kashmiri communities in the United States sustain collective attention to ongoing events in Kashmir when digital platforms are withheld in India and community initiatives face surveillance. Sevilla is working on a novel which explores how Indigenous Mexican communities have resisted cultural erasure. Anthropology graduate student Melis Gemalmaz envisions attention as a form of solidarity and a spiritual and ethical practice as it emerged in Antakya, Turkey, after the 2023 earthquakes. She studies how the act of attending to another’s suffering and welfare acquired renewed significance within a crisis.
Some projects consider the narrative potential of attention by examining how attention to objects, art, and storytelling can create meaning and therapeutic outcomes. Tirna Chandra, a graduate student in English, examines attention to objects and materials in narratives by First World War female medical caregivers as a therapeutic tool for trauma. For anthropology graduate student Jeremi Panganiban, physical objects and activities also tell the story of attention. Using photographs, storytelling walks, and community mapping, Panganiban studies how coastal residents in the Philippines use “noticing” to document and navigate ecological and economic transitions from fishing to tourism.
Shifting to visual arts more explicitly, art historian Elyse Speaks researches how sculptors in the 1970s and 1980s combined organic, found, and industrial materials; she argues that these artists use such materials specifically to direct attention to the resulting “entanglements.” In the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, assistant professor Johannes Ruhland looks at the use of medieval “exempla” in thirteenth-century texts. By analyzing these illustrative anecdotes, Ruhland asks whether the era’s French historians acted as “attention seekers” to teach their audiences how to lead moral lives. Ultimately, these studies demonstrate that such modes of attention are not only about seeing but also about caring, remembering, and acting.
A few notable insights emerged out of these varied research projects. Almost every discipline explicitly viewed attention not only as a mental faculty but also as a finite resource claimed by various platforms and social structures. The scholars draw clear distinctions between “fast” attention (TikTok, deepfakes, and doomscrolling) and “slow” attention (ethnographies, painting, archival research, and meditation). Ultimately, this research suggests that the simple act of “paying attention” to another human is, in itself, a political and ethical act. The Franco Institute is proud to support this work demonstrating the innovative research in the College of Arts & Letters.
Originally published by at franco.nd.edu on March 24, 2026.