The Great Simplification #125 – Vanessa Andreotti: “Hospicing Modernity and Rehabilitating Humanity”

In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture. Whether you refer to it as the meta crisis, the polycrisis, or – in Nate’s terms – the human predicament, Vanessa brings a unique framing rooted in Indigenous knowledge and relationality to aid in understanding, grieving, and building emotional resilience within this space. What does it mean to live and work within systems that are designed to fail, embedded in an aimless culture? How do we as individuals steady ourselves and create inner strength before engaging in such harrowing work? Importantly, what could education look like if founded on the principles of intergenerational knowledge transmission and emotional regulation, that are centered on our collective entanglement with the Earth?

About Vanessa Andreotti

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. Vanessa has more than 100 published articles in areas related to global and climate education. She has also worked extensively across sectors internationally in projects related to global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective, and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies.

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