This event takes place on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Register here.

Charis welcomes Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in conversation with Sharon Stein & Giovanna de Oliveira Andreotti for a discussion of Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion, a work that helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration.

The inevitable is coming fast. We know it in our bones—and it’s past time to face it.

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.

Vanessa Machado De Oliveira helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration. She explores the impacts of colonialism as neurocolonization: an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine, and adapt. These impacts are wide-ranging and run deep: they cut us off from our natural ways of building community and seeking pleasure. They choke our ability to cope with trauma and embrace complexity. And they trap us in a state of artificial comfort and denial that keeps us from collectively growing up—even when our existence demands it. 

This book invites you to interrupt 5 lies that neurocolonization instills in us—beliefs (and behaviors) that have condition us to think we’re owed the following, regardless of others or the planet:

- Moral and epistemic self-righteous authority 

- Arbitrating truth, law, and common sense 

- Affirming one's virtues, innocence, and purity 

- Exploitative appropriation and accumulation of various forms of capital

In moving away from these ingrained worldviews, we can choose instead to develop 4 capacities necessary to our—and Earth’s survival: sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility.

Machado De Oliveira moves beyond critique into a praxis of strategic disinvestment: one that invites us to recognize what no longer serves us and reinvest in nurturing structures and lifeways that restore our knowledge in the value of life for life’s sake. 


Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, where she leads transformative conversations about education in complex times. 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 and has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, 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. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, co-authored with Aiden Cinnamon Tea (an emergent intelligence), explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.

Sharon Stein is a Professor of Climate Complexity and Coloniality at the University of British Columbia. Her work asks how education can prepare people to navigate social and ecological destabilization in relationally rigorous and intergenerationally responsible ways. She is a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective and author of Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Press, 2022).

Giovanna de Oliveira Andreotti is a Dancer/dance teacher, GTDF member, certified Warm Data Lab host, R4Rs founder, and online course facilitator/coordinator. Giovanna has been involuntarily steeped in depth-education from birth (courtesy of her mother, Vanessa Andreotti). Giovanna holds a Bachelor's in Psychology from UBC, postgraduate certifications in Climate Psychology and Embodied Social Justice, and currently coordinates an intergenerational inquiry that maps pedagogical practices addressing complexity, complicity, collapse, and accountability.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate.

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.

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