Facing Human Wrongs Course

Facing Human Wrongs: Navigating Paradoxes and Complexities of Global Change

There is no genuine possibility of hope if we cannot face all aspects of reality: the good, the bad, the broken and the messed up. The course Facing Human Wrongs (FHW) was designed to expand our collective capacity to hold space for difficult and painful things without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized or demanding quick fixes or rescue from discomfort. The course invites us to face our shadows, to compost our (metaphorical and literal) sh*t and to stay with the trouble in order to learn to weather storms of epic proportions together. The course is based on a particular form of inquiry that is counter-intuitive: it asks us to temporarily suspend our conditioned desires for hope, solutions and futurity, and invites us to sit with the magnitude of the challenges we are facing within and around us without turning away. FHW offers an (un)learning experience based on depth education, the work of the GTDF arts/research collective and the book Hospicing Modernity.

The fourth public cycle of FHW will take place in June 2023. Registrations will open in May 2023. If you are interested in being notified about when registrations will open, please sign up below.

This course was originally designed by Vanessa Andreotti, Will Valley, Sharon Stein, Azul (Carolina Duque) and Kyra Fay for students at the University of British Columbia. The content and rationale are creative commons (free of charge) and available online here. We kindly ask everyone who is interested in taking this course to complete unit 1, especially the questionnaire “Is this course for me?” before confirming their registration.

This course is part of a much larger umbrella of initiatives related to carbon debt reparations, which includes a fundraising campaign for emergencies faced by our Indigenous collaborators in Brazil.