ILLUMINATING WORLDVIEWS on AI and Courting the Otherwise S1:3
Aerial image of an Artic braided river.
How might we face the end? Vanessa Andreotti and Ayana delve into questions of what it means to live well during this fractured end of modernity. How can we best visualize the systems that have brought us to this point, and how might we bring ourselves out of them? Speaking to the complexity of birth and death in this moment, Vanessa sheds light on what she calls hospicing modernity – the act of bearing witness to a system that is unraveling.
Vanessa and Ayana then explore the tools that may accompany us on our way towards existing differently. From efforts of grounding, to AI, to relationality, they consider how we may grow to think and move into the beyond. We have been conditioned to forget our belonging to Earth, to one another, to death itself. What thread might pull us back together?
“How can we exist differently? How can this moment of the stabilization of death of the old be also a portal or a threshold where we do the reckoning that is necessary?”
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti (she/her) is a Latinx professor at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change. She began her career as a teacher in Brazil in 1994 and has since led educational and research programs in countries including the UK, Finland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Brazil, and Canada.
♫ The music in this episode is “After the Rain” by Cole Pulice courtesy of Leaving Records and “I Believe in Being Ready” by Rising Appalachia.
Vanessa’s book, Hospicing Modernity, refuses simple answers. It asks readers to face the patterns of modernity built on colonial expansion and relentless extraction that have thrown our world off balance. She calls on us to take responsibility and unlearn the habits that keep us causing harm. Through thought experiments and practical exercises, Machado de Oliveira exposes how a sense of entitlement and the illusion of progress shape our choices, guiding us toward a way of living grounded in humility and care for people and planet.
Climate collapse, social crisis, the decline of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, and our full-faced denial have ushered in an urgent new era. Hospicing Modernity asked us to grow up, step up, and show up for our communities and the living Earth. Outgrowing Modernity helps us make sense of where we’re going—and deepen what’s possible—in a time of endings.
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Our Partners
This series was produced thanks to the generous support of the team at Illuminating Worldviews, held by the RIVER collective and Northern Council for Global Cooperation. We are so grateful to the organizers, speakers, and audience members who made this series possible.
Vanessa Andreotti and Ayana explore what it means to live well amid the fractures of modernity. Reflecting on the tensions of birth and death in our time, Vanessa shares her idea of hospicing modernity—the act of bearing witness to a system that is unraveling.