Fellows
Mercedes Laney is a practitioner and educator whose work uniquely integrates emergency management, contemplative practice, and the humanities. She is the founder of The Stillwater Room, a contemplative education practice offering tailored one-on-one sessions and small workshops in Old Town Alexandria and online, as well as the broader Stillwater Collective and The Stillwater Listening Room podcast.
A central focus of her work is the development of attentional literacy. Mercedes argues that while modern economic and technological systems are expertly designed to capture attention, individuals are rarely taught how to work skillfully with it. Through her practice, she seeks to reframe attention not as a mere productivity issue or personal failing, but as a crucial, trainable human capacity and public skill.
During the Evermay Future Fellows residency, Mercedes is working to translate her contemplative insights into a rigorous, public-facing framework. She is bridging the gap between contemplative education and broader social systems by developing three practical outputs: a conceptual framework exploring attention as a resource, capacity, and form of agency, a pilot attentional inquiry workshop, and a research essay tentatively titled Attentional Literacy in the Age of Capture.
Ultimately, her work at Evermay aims to explore how cultivating attentional literacy can shift the power dynamics between individuals and systems designed to compete for attention, fostering a future built on discernment, perception, and ethical imagination.
