Kentucky Convergence

"Mindful Scrolling: Mindfulness Rhetoric and The Digital Realm" - Sarah Beach

This Lightning Round presentation is a sample of a piece of multi-modal scholarship on Buddhist mindfulness, rhetoric, and digital media. The piece will be submitted to a digital rhetoric journal as a guided meditation that supports media consumption through the lens of mindfulness, an Eastern philosophy with applications for the Western world. As a certified meditation coach and rhetorical scholar, my work blends mindfulness with the study of affect, embodiment, ambience, and circulation in digital spheres. In our current milieu, mindfulness may serve as one approach to re-frame our approaches to digital literacy, political communication online, classroom behaviors, and myriad other spheres. Mindfulness can serve as a rhetorical approach, as it asks questions regarding who and what counts as a rhetor, how we engage with digital technologies, and how humans as a species can engage with the changing arenas of AI, VR, ubiquitous technological devices, and rapid technological advances. For the Lightning Round, I propose to lead a short (5-6 minute) sample of the meditation project in person and then provide a brief explanation of my research and its applications in the classroom, rhetorical scholarship, the workplace, and beyond. I will also provide a handout with further information and links to find out more.



"Let's Be Still (And Other Nice Things): Lessons from Ancient Rome for Today's Higher Education Professionals" - Adam Shaw

Regardless of our role in higher education, we can be pulled in countless directions: technical support, instructional design, faculty development workshops, and all other sorts of things. Couple this with the demands on our attention from social media, advances in technology, and everything else going on in the world, and it becomes increasingly difficult to not only focus on the success of the courses we're developing, the projects we're leading, and the faculty we're working with, but to find satisfaction in these things. While many of these demands are the result of extraordinary advances and their effects on the pace of our lives, this longing for peace and fulfillment is nothing new. It dates back centuries to the Stoics and Ancient Rome (and beyond).

In this lightning talk—or, maybe think of it as a mental health check—we’ll explore some small, digestible takeaways from Stoic philosophy as they relate to the demands on higher education professionals in design and support settings today. Participants will leave not only with strategies they can immediately fold into their day-to-day roles, but with easy-to-use resources they can explore for further learning.