Can we transform our relations given our history?

'Can we transform our relations given our history?’

Vanessa Andreotti & Dougald Hine

In this session, we will share what we are learning together about the kinds of cognitive, affective and relational “decluttering” that are called for, if we are to have a chance of interrupting the patterns and letting go of the attachments and co-dependencies that make us complicit with the system that many of us are trying to change.

We speak about ‘gesturing towards decolonial futures’, recognising that we are reaching towards futures that are presently unthinkable and unimaginable. For us, this process involves facing humanity’s wrongs, our own complicities in harm, and the likelihood of social and ecological collapse in our lifetime, while learning to walk a tightrope between naive hope and desperate hopelessness, with honesty, humility, humor and hyper-self-reflexivity.

In this sense, decolonial gestures start with the interruption of our satisfaction with harmful desires encouraged and rewarded in the current system – including desires for looking and feeling good, for certainty, for unrestricted autonomy, for innocence (redemption, absolution), for simplistic solutions, for heroic protagonism and for unlimited consumption.

https://decolonialfutures.net/2021/02/15/gift-contract/  

https://dark-mountain.net/the-vital-compass/

Vanessa Andreotti focuses on historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of knowledge and inequalities and how these mobilize global imaginaries that limit or enable different possibilities for (co)existence and global change. This includes a focus on what prevents most social innovations from gesturing towards decolonial futures. Vanessa holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, at the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  She has extensive experience working across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, community engagement, indigenous knowledge systems and internationalization.  

Dougald Hine’s writing includes Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (with Paul Kingsnorth), The Crossing of Two Lines (with Performing Pictures) and Notes From Underground (an essay series for Bella Caledonia). He is co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and presents The Great Humbling podcast with Ed Gillespie. Originally from the north-east of England, since 2012 he has been settled in central Sweden where he and his partner Anna Björkman are creating a school called HOME.

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