The JMU Attention Literacy Initiative is an interdisciplinary collaboration of faculty, students, and community members who want to help restore the ability of individuals to accomplish goals and maintain intentions in the face of ever-increasing distractions and busyness.  

The initiative began as a series of conversations between two JMU faculty members, Dr. Jared Featherstone of Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies, and Dr. Sri Upadhyay of Psychology. At the time, Featherstone was still the University Writing Center Director and Upadhyay a member of the UWC Advisory Board.  

Faculty on the Advisory Board were reporting that students were increasingly struggling with writing assignments, especially those that involved close analysis and writing from sources. As a group, they determined that many of these writing problems were actually reading problems, as students struggled to read and synthesize the necessary source material for writing. In subsequent discussions between Featherstone and Upadhyay, they determined that these reading and writing issues were actually, in the most fundamental level, issues of attention management.  

In 2023, planning began for the creation of attention management resources for the JMU community and courses that would enable students to gain knowledge and become involved in this attention literacy movement. This was the start of the Attention Literacy Initiative.  

Topics of Interest 

• The science of human attention
• The attention economy
• Mindfulness as an attention intervention
• Attention and goal enactment
• Technological solutions to goal interference
• Media multitasking
• Attention and learning
• Attention, Media, and Ethics