GCSC Keynote Lecture: Vanessa Andreotti: The Enduring Educational Challenges of Setting Horizons of Hope Beyond Modern-Colonial Imaginaries

For Winter Semester 2018/19 each of the lectures in the five-part lecture series addresses the key concept of Contact Zones of the Study of Culture from different interdisciplinary perspectives.  The events are open to the public and no registration is required.

As societies face unprecedented challenges that are global in scope and “wicked” in nature, the usual educational response has been to emphasize the need for more knowledge, better policies, and more compelling arguments, in order to effectively convince more people to change their convictions, and, as a consequence, their behaviour. My research collective has been experimenting with a different educational orientation that does not see the problems of the present primarily as rooted in a methodological challenge of better strategies (i.e. the call for more effective policies and communications), nor an epistemological challenge of knowing (i.e. the call for more data, information or perspectives).  Rather, we propose that the problems are rooted in an ontological challenge of being (i.e. the call to address how we exist in relation to each other and the planet). From this educational orientation, the problems lies in the universalization of a modern/colonial imaginary that creates intellectual, affective and relational economies that invisibilize the violences that subsidize modern/colonial systems, and that hide their inherent unsustainability. The modern/colonial approach to education has left us unprepared and unwilling to address our complicity in systemic social and ecological harm, and to set our horizons of hope beyond what is intelligible and desirable within it. In this talk, I will share some of the social cartographies, analyses and experiments of the “Gesturing towards decolonial futures” collective and the “In Earth’s CARE” network of social-ecological innovations focused on transformative justice.

// Prof. Vanessa Andreotti (University of British Columbia)