Canada Seminar

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Depth Education: Confronting Coloniality, Navigating Complexity and Rewiring the Unconscious

Vanessa Andreotti, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia
 
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is an arts/research collective that emerged in response to the challenges of confronting colonialism in the arts and education sectors in Canada. GTDF has designed and tested the pedagogical practice of “depth education” as a possible ethical response to these challenges and as a way to expand our collective capacity to hold space for difficult conversations without relationships falling apart. Depth education invites a noncoercive rearrangement of desires towards responsibility before will (Gayatri Spivak). It draws on three strands of practice: 1) ontological critiques of modernity/coloniality; 2) systems/complexity literacies; and 3) a non-Western mode of psychoanalysis that attempts to interrupt the colonization of the unconscious. First, the talk offers an outline of the work of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and a brief analysis of complex challenges and paradoxes of modern/colonial education. Second, the talk presents key features of depth education, and an overview of a targeted open online course (TOOC), “Facing Human Wrongs”, which illustrates these features in practice. 
 
Vanessa Andreotti is a professor at the Department of Educational Studies at UBC. She currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and the David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education. She is the interim director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced (interdisciplinary) Studies and the incoming Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.