Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity—for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity

This book is not easy: it contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.
 
Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance. We take more than we give; we inoculate ourselves in positive self-regard while continuing to make harmful choices; we wreak irreparable havoc on the ecosystems, habitats, and beings with whom we share our planet. But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?
 


Machado de Oliveira breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance—the do-gooder who does “good enough,” then retreats to business as usual; the incognito capitalist who, at first glance, may seem like a radical change-maker—and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviors, and belief systems hold us back . . . and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest. Including exercises used with teachers, NGO practitioners, and global changemakers, she offers us thought experiments that ask us to:
 


•  Reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis


•  Better assess our surroundings and interact with difference, uncertainty, complexity, and failure


•  Expand our capacity to hold personal and collective space for difficult and painful things


•  Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism


•  Interrupt our satisfaction with modern-colonial desires that cause harm


•  Create space for change driven neither by desperate hope nor a fear of desolate hopelessness
 


For fans of adrienne maree brown, Sherri Mitchell, and Arundhati Roy, Hospicing Modernity challenges our assumptions and dares to ask more of us, for the sake of us all.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti (she/her) is a Latinx professor at the University of British Columbia. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change. She began her career as a teacher in Brazil in 1994 and has since led educational and research programs in countries including the UK, Finland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Brazil, and Canada.
Andreotti works across sectors in international and comparative education, particularly focusing on global justice and citizenship, Indigenous and community engagement, sustainability, and social and ecological responsibility. Her research examines relationships between historical, systemic, and on-going forms of violence, and the inherent unsustainability of modernity. Andreotti is one of the founding members of Gesturing Decolonial Futures Collective (decolonialfutures.net) and Teia das 5 Curas, an international network of Indigenous communities mostly in Canada and Latin America. She currently collaborates with with these groups to direct research projects and learning initiatives related to global healing and wellbeing in times of unprecedented challenges.