This text complements chapters 7 and 8 of the book Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism. It was read in the fifth session of the Hospicing Modernity zoom series. Chapter 8 was the chapter where both physical and psychological pain showed up as teachers in ways that made me naked …
by Cash Ahenakew Part of the work of the GTDF collective has been around “growing up”. The term is used with reference to sobering up, to owning up and to showing up differently in the world. Previous work in this area includes a collaboration with John Cryer on the Four Mountains story, the collaborative design …
The idea for this letter emerged in a conversation between a group of Indigenous researchers and immigrants residing in what is currently known as Canada and involved with the GTDF collective. The first draft was written in March 2021 for a conference about the intersections of Indigenization and internationalization in education. Subsequent drafts were expanded …
Continue reading "Letter to prospective immigrants to what is known as Canada"
Modernity/coloniality, especially in its contemporary configuration, casts a powerful spell of hyper-individualism, hyper-consumerism and (self)destructive narcissism. Through formal education, social media and job incentive packages, both mainstream and counter- cultures encourage and reward toxic behaviors. This includes seeing ourselves as separate from each other and from “nature”, and as “exceptional” in order to justify merit …
These are reflections arising from failed experiments of bringing people together to have conversations about systemic, historical and on-going violence and the climate crisis. These patterns of failure are related to deeply entrenched habits grounded on an escalating sense of entitlement to consume knowledge, relations, experiences and drama on one’s terms. Depth conversations start when …
Sharon Stein created an exercise called “CIRCULAR” (first published in this article) that identifies eight expected intellectual, affective and performative dispositional patterns that modernity has imprinted in our unconscious and that it rewards. These patterns may prevent us from sensing, relating and imagining otherwise, but since they are perceived as normal and natural, there is …
We chose the word “gesture” for the title of our collective to underscore the fact that decolonization is impossible when our livelihoods are underwritten by colonial violence and unsustainability. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, our health systems and social security, and the technologies that allow us to write about this are all …
For many Indigenous people, the collapse of the current violent and unsustainable system is not necessarily bad news. [A shorter version of this text was published in Open Democracy in August 2020] This text weaves together Indigenous teachings that affirm that if we approach the potential, likelihood or inevitability of the collapse of our current …
Continue reading "Preparing for the end of the world as we know it"
The Cartographies of Aging have been created and are being stewarded by Jocelyn Yerxa (NS GovLab), Steeven Pedneault (PRÉSÂGES), Mo Drescher (Brave Space), and Rachel Derrah (Brave Space). Our group has been working with the methodologies and practices of the GTDF collective for a couple of years and in January, we took a deeper dive …
Some background Dr. Jem Bendell is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK). He is also a co-founder of the Deep Adaptation movement that emerged in response to a paper he wrote in 2018 entitled: Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating …
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures 