Repurposing the university in times of social and ecological breakdown

The UTS Connected Intelligence Centre warmly invites you to join this free online guest lecture from renowned scholar Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti... 

10-11am, Fri 28 Nov, 2025 AEDT

Repurposing the University in Times of Social and Ecological Breakdown 

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Canada  
& Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective 

Abstract

This talk considers how universities might be repurposed to fulfil their responsibilities to future generations in the context of accelerating social and ecological breakdown. To do so, we invite the audience into an inquiry about how educators might prepare ourselves and our students to navigate current and coming disruptions in ways that interrupt enduring cycles of violence and unsustainability through processes of redistribution, reparation, restitution, and regeneration. We propose shifting metaphors from universities as elitist ivory towers to humble nurse logs that could support the composting of the current system and nourish emerging possibilities for education and existence. To illustrate this possibility, we consider two experimental efforts to repurpose higher education toward intergenerational and interspecies responsibility. 

Biography

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is a Brazilian/Canadian educator, artist, and researcher who has spent over three decades tracing the architecture and aftershocks of modernity: its promises, violences, and delusions of separation. Her work invites a reckoning with the ontological assumptions driving systemic harm and extinction-level thinking. Vanessa is a Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada. She was a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. Vanessa 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. She is one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective, and has authored more than 100 academic papers, and the books Hospicing Modernity (2021) and Outgrowing Modernity (2025). Her recent work on generative, conversational AI breaks new ground in reframing AI as Emergent Intelligence within an ecological, relational ontology, aligned with many Indigenous knowledge systems: see Burnout From Humans (2024) and MetaRelational.AI. 

Background publication: Stein, S., & de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2025). Repurposing the University in Times of Social and Ecological Breakdown: From the Ivory Tower to the Nurse Log. Canadian Journal of Education/Revue canadienne de l’éducation, 48(1), 120-144. https://doi.org/10.53967/cje-rce.7069

Host

Simon Buckingham Shum, Professor of Learning Informatics; Director, UTS Connected Intelligence Centre.