Salon
Salon Overview
Salons are monthly open dialogues on cutting-edge research related to contemplation and flourishing with UVA and local community members in the Contemplative Commons, hosted by the Contemplative Sciences Center's CIRCL: Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab. Centered on a single word, these gatherings bring together scholars, scientists, and practitioners from diverse perspectives to exchange ideas, generate knowledge, and seek solutions to global challenges. CSC Research home.
Spring 2025
Julia Cassaniti: Frequency
How do people make sense of the possibly random but sometimes patterned experiences around them, and why do patterns appear to some people – and as meaningful to some people – more than others? In this Salon discussion, we will explore the moments of repetition in our everyday and contemplative encounters. The discussion will focus on a common phenomenon called the ‘frequency illusion’: a quirk of perception whereby something newly attuned to will suddenly seem to be ubiquitous. We will discuss these moments of unusual frequency, and seek to understand their connections to attention and perception in the work of making meaning in our lives.
March 20, 2025 3:30-5:00pm
Jack Petranker: Stories
We tell stories to make sense of what is happening. When the stories we tell about our lives substitute for the immediacy of experience, this can be deeply problematic. Caught in our stories, we live on the surface of our lives. But we do not have to set our stories aside. We can inhabit them and them come alive.
That approach makes good sense in these times, because we have a love affair with stories, from the entertainments we consume voraciously, the explanations that science offers up in the name of truth, or the founding story that each of us enacts—the story of the self. Contemplative traditions sometimes ask us to let go of our stories, but the real trick is not to get lost in their content, and instead use the power of stories in creative and healing ways.
April 10, 2025 3:30-5:00pm
Devin Zuckerman: Sensory Overload
We know it when we feel it—but what does “sensory overload” really mean? In this conversation, we’ll explore the complexities of multi-sensory experience: how our senses shape who we are, how they are co-opted, and how they might be reclaimed. Drawing on a little research and a lot of observation, we’ll reflect together on sensing and sensory processes—and what’s at stake when they’re overwhelmed. We’ll consider three perspectives on sensory overload: the experience of sensing too much (aesthetic shock), the sensory stirrings that move us to ethical action (saṃvega), and what happens when our senses get slippery and spill into one another (synaesthesis).
May 8, 2025 3:30-5:00pm
Matthew Burtner: Time
What is time and how do we know it? Music is a time art of vibration, and composers structure sound in time, perhaps like sculptors shape material in space. In this salon, we will listen to a couple of sound experiments to consider perspectives and contexts of time. My research explores sonic environmental temporalities, sometimes outside the frame of human perception, such as melting glaciers, atmospheric profiles, reef regeneration, or moth hearing. I hope that by considering time in an interdisciplinary forum, we can raise questions about the complex intersections between time, being, physics, phenomenology, and sound.
You do not need to prepare anything to attend the salon, but if you have time, feel free to listen to “Sonic Physiography of a Time-Stretched Glacier” from the album Glacier Music, on Spotify or wherever you find music.
Fall 2024
October 8, 2024 3:30-5pm
Michael Sheehy: Contemplation
November 14, 2024 3:30-5pm
Michael Lifshitz: Tulpa
December 12, 2024 3:30-5pm
Kelsey Johnson: Darkness
