Is it possible to create thriving, liveable futures without doing the work to acknowledge and process the destructive systems, stories and behaviours that are causing so much devastation to life on Earth today ?
- To understand how these logics run deeply through us and our dominant ways of thinking, seeing and relating.
- To create space to collectively compost these ways to ensure we do not continue to perpetuate the same destructive patterns as we co-create responses and pathways into the future.
- To recognise the urgent need for intergenerational responsibility, to connect across generations for collective processing, learning and healing and cultivating moral responsibility for future life.
Personally I don’t believe we can avoid this work for much longer if we are serious about meaningful change and my guest in this episode Vanessa Andreotti has dedicated her life work to exploring how the dominant knowledge systems of modernity and ways of relating to ourselves, to each other and to the Earth are deeply entangled with the growing violence, divisiveness and declining health of all life on this planet - human and more than human.
Vanessa is Dean of Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada, Author, of the groundbreaking book - Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism and Co-founder, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.
Vanessa’s life work has been in education and learning, her practice is rooted in relationality, indigenous knowledge and centering our entanglement with the living Earth.
She has worked extensively across sectors internationally and is a leading voice in global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergencies.
If you haven’t read Hospicing Modernity, you may find some of this conversation challenging.
Hospicing Modernity is not a comfortable read, it proposes that colonialism, racism and other toxic divisions and cultural supremacies that inform the systems of Modernity that we all inhabit run deeply inside us - perhaps neuro-biologically - it invites readers into an uncomfortable unlearning journey, of noticing, letting go, composting and unmaking ourselves from the violent ways of seeing and being that modernity and industrial consumerist society has created.
We explore:
The challenges we are facing on Spaceship Earth
Responsibilities and challenges in education systems
Hospicing Modernity: The context today
The dis-ease of separation
Intergenerational responsibilities
Composting W.E.I.R.D s**t - Western, Entitled, Individualistic, Reductionist and Delusional.
The role of education, humour and metaphor in addressing complexity
The gut as a site of learning and vulnerability
Embracing entanglement
Healing our fractured relationship with Earth
Supporting the young
The role of elders and rites of passage, transitioning through grief
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