Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, OUTGROWING MODERNITY

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, discusses her new book Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion, a follow up to Hospicing Modernity. 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.

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

The highly anticipated follow-up to Hospicing Modernity: how we activate responsibility, nurture care, and grow up in the face of collapse—includes reflections, exercises, and prompts.

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; unrestricted, unaccountable autonomy; 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 former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, and one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.

Pre-order your copy of Outgrowing Modernity here.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company