Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti's new book Outgrowing Modernity offers practical guidance for navigating systemic crisis through what she calls "reality-hinging" instead of truth-telling. It's a sequel to Hospicing Modernity and comes out August 12. Her daughter Giovanna reflects on growing up with these radical ideas in tension with family expectations.
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Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and this is a special trailer episode for a big moment that's coming up this week.
Once you can connect to that excess and you see different layers and combinations, and then you see yourself as part of this reality mulching, also in motion, right? As irreducibly indeterminate, irreparably plural, and also impermanent.
To mark the moment and celebrate the release of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andriotti's new book, Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion, we're so happy to be able to bring you this fantastic episode. The book is the sequel to Vanessa's Hospicing Modernity, which was published in 2021, and in 4 short years has come to be recognized as one of the most important books of the century. This new book is arguably even better, and Krista Tippett, the award-winning journalist, author, and public intellectual, has called it a moral, intellectual, and spiritual masterpiece. But one of the best things about it is that it's a workbook full of guidance for the strength, endurance, and flexibility training that we need to be doing ourselves and in our communities, schools, and organizations to meet the moment we're deeply in. It's not a work that can simply be ingested for its truth-telling, as you'll very much hear from Vanessa in the conversation.
It really landed in my body in a very different way because I think what I've tried to do in education, the craft that I'm interested in, is reality hinging. It's not truth-telling. And it's very frustrating when people take what I'm trying to offer as truth-telling, because in truth-telling, especially within modernity, you have to perform an authority. And it's an authority that mimics colonialism and patriarchy, basically. And sometimes, like in academia, We have to do that. There's no other way to create the leverage you need to continue your inquiry in reality engine, for example.
The book comes out on Tuesday, the 12th of August, so get online today and get your preorder copy if you haven't already. And on Wednesday morning, this full episode will be released in collaboration with Manda Scott and her wonderful Accidental Gods channel. We're so happy to be able to share this fantastic conversation between Vanessa, her daughter Giovanna de Oliveira Andriotti, myself, and Manda.
On one hand, here's my mother that literally birthed me, and she's going through all these experiments, and she has this way of holding a reverence for life, and she's questioning these categorizations, which make a lot of sense, I think, especially for younger generations where we saw all these cracks. We're like, "Yeah, it makes sense that we're in a box because look at the water filling in, look at the crack." But then you go to school and it's the opposite. They're trying to tell you the opposite. Like, "No, no, no, trust in the system." 'Everything will be okay. What your mom's saying is not relevant. She's a crazy lady.' And it wasn't even the schools saying that, actually. They actually liked the fact that my mom was a professor and that, 'Oh my God, she's so educated, and you guys are the top model minority. Like, you are the picture of success. You came from a third world country and now you're here.' But it was my family saying like, 'No, your mom's kind of crazy. Like, don't listen to her. Be a success for us. Like, prove her wrong. Like, Follow in her footsteps, but only in the sense that is progression. So it was really difficult for me growing up. There was a lot of tension, and I'm realizing more and more now that the tension actually was in like, how do you hold all of this at once? How do you sit in the complexity of like things pulling you in different directions and trusting your knowing, your being, your relating?
You can find links to Vanessa and Giovanna's work in the show notes, as well as the broader work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collaborative. You can find this podcast and Manda's podcast both on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other channels. And please do take a moment to subscribe so that you get the episode as it comes out on Wednesday, and maybe leave us a review as it really does help others to find the podcast too.
