Intensive Summer Course 2026
From Self to Interbeing: Critical Zen CARE in the Age of Climate–AI
Instructor: Prof. Chia-ju Chang (Brooklyn College, CUNY)
Email: Cchang@brooklyn.cuny.eduTerm: Summer 2026
Course Format: Three-week intensive
Meeting Schedule: Three sessions per week; three hours per session
Instructional Mode: In-person
Intensive Summer Course 2026
From Self to Interbeing: Critical Zen CARE in the Age of Climate–AI
In the digital and AI age, human experience of the self and the world has increasingly fragmented into immediate, fleeting, and discontinuous sensations, making it difficult to sustain experiences capable of carrying meaning over time. This course begins from this condition and invites students to reconsider a foundational question: in an era of acceleration, mediation, and distraction, how might we reestablish a point of departure for our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world?
This short, intensive course examines the crisis of attention and experience precipitated by digital technologies and AI through the lens of Meditative Critical Humanities. The course integrates contemplative practice, critical theory, and ethical inquiry to explore how meditative traditions can offer alternative ways of understanding perception, subjectivity, and relational life in a time of ecological and technological transformation.
The course progresses through three interrelated movements. Week One investigates the contemporary crisis of attention and introduces concentration practice as a response to digital distraction and the attention economy. Week Two focuses on embodied awareness, bringing together Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Zen meditation to examine perception as bodily contact shaped by habitual patterns (vāsanā), and to reopen alternative modes of relating to experience. Week Three turns toward ethical and relational dimensions, engaging questions of interbeing, ecological crisis, and shared existential vulnerability as defining conditions of contemporary life.
Each session integrates textual discussion, meditation practice, and Zen kōan study, emphasizing the co-constitution of theory, experience, and contemplative practice. The course culminates in a student-designed engagement project in which students translate contemplative insight into a small-scale creative, reflective, or relational intervention.
This graduate-level summer intensive is designed to enable students to explore Meditative Critical Humanities within a concentrated timeframe and to develop contemplative inquiry as an embodied, relational, and ethically responsive scholarly practice. No prior meditation experience is required.