OPCLeadLearn Keynote Speakers

We are excited to present two inspiring and though-provoking keynote speakers at the conference! 

innovative, engaging, inspiring, transformative, thought-provoking

Speaker Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti - Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria - Friday, November 14

Climate, Complexity and Intergenerational Accountability

Drawing insights from University of the Forest digital campus initiative (universityoftheforest.org), this talk explores how the ontology of modern education has socialized us into a form of narrow-boundary intelligence marked by the artificial separation between humans and the rest of nature. This narrow-boundary intelligence creates a crisis of collective sense making that is the root of our current meta-crisis characterized by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), which is placing humanity at risk of premature extinction. The talk will also explore the need for a collective cultural move towards wide-boundary intelligence and, ultimately, relational wisdom, if we are to address the meta-crisis together.

Biography
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti 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, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.