facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand
Satish Kumar
Vandana Shiva
Veronica Strang
Manda Scott
Beloved Sara Zaltash
David Abram
Dr Andreas Weber
David Whyte
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Dr. Predrag Slijepcevic
Charles Eisenstein
Aisha Paris Smith
Brontë Velez
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
GTDF are a trans-disciplinary collective of researchers, artists, educators, students & Indigenous knowledge keepers.
Their collaborative practices bring together concerns related to racism, colonialism, unsustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, economic instability, mental health crises, & intensifications of social & ecological violence. The focus of the work is on building stamina, capacity & dispositions for painful work (self-and world-unmaking) through artistic & educational experiments that can help us to hold space for difficult conversations.
course
Sensing Harm by Design
This is a six-week course designed to support you to activate dispositions that can expand your capacity to navigate increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) and to hold space for what is difficult and painful without feeling overwhelmed, immobilised or demanding quick fixes or rescue from discomfort.
course
Kinship: Being Together
A transformative online course exploring community, relationality & belonging in the worlds we live in. What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be in relationship with the ever-unfurling world we find ourselves a part of? What, exactly, is community? And who do we really mean when we say _we_? The Kinship 2022 course is an exploration into being together in a time when being apart has fractured our relationship to self, other, and the more-than-human in ways that have left us painfully adrift. It is a timely collective inquiry into how community, relationality, and belonging can revitalise our sense of aliveness as creatures of and participants in this animate earth, and how such a renewal might influence our actions towards greater flourishing. _One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone._ Shannon L. Alder
article
How do we hospice modernity?
There is a whole spectrum of responses to the violences of the modern-colonial system: soft reform, which involves policies and practices; radical reform, including more people and perspectives; and beyond reform, which disinvests in the current unsustainable world and walk into the possibility of new worlds. In this session, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces this spectrum, contextualising it in their Collective's pedagogy: based in hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us, facing our complicity in violence and unsustainability, composting our individual and collective shit, and holding space without falling apart. They will also introduce an upcoming six-week online course they have curated, organised by advaya, titled Sensing Harm by Design, which is based on their work and pedagogy.
article
Failing with rigour
Can failure be generative? In the context of accountability processes and decolonial work, how do we balance necessary empathy for ourselves and each other when we do fail, with discipline and rigour?
film
Spaces of reform, a social cartography
There is a whole spectrum of responses to the violences of the modern-colonial system: soft reform, which involves policies and practices; radical reform, including more people and perspectives; and beyond reform, which disinvests in the current unsustainable world and walk into the possibility of new worlds. In this session, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces this spectrum, contextualising it in their Collective's pedagogy: based in hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us, facing our complicity in violence and unsustainability, composting our individual and collective shit, and holding space without falling apart. They will also introduce the six-week online course they have curated, organised by advaya, titled Sensing Harm by Design, which is based on their work and pedagogy.
film
The bus metaphor for our complex and contradictory selves
In the opening week of the online course, Sensing Harm by Design, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces the bus metaphor. Here are snippets from the session, and some questions to sit with.
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Education 2048: learning for future survival
In the second week of the online course, Sensing Harm by Design, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces the Education 2048 exercise. Here are snippets from the session.
film
Understanding the disease of separability
In the third week of the online course, Sensing Harm by Design, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces a cartography for getting to the depth of the problem of separability. Here are snippets from the session.
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Towards braiding: bricks and threads
In the fourth week of the online course, Sensing Harm by Design, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces a cartography developed from collaboration between Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti as part of their work with the Musagetes Arts Foundation.
film
What is depth education?
In the fifth week of the online course, Sensing Harm by Design, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces the concept of depth education, using the imagery of a mountain and viewing it from different perspectives to illustrate how depth education is differentiated from its counterpart: mastery education. Instead of attempting to conquer a peak, depth education encourages us to engage with the affective and relational, to approach learning from the gut, decluttering the noise and composting the shit.
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Expanding our collective capacity in depth complexity
How do we develop the stomach to respond holistically, realistically and reflexively in the face of problems we face within the modern-colonial system? In the final week of the online course, Sensing Harm by Design, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective introduces three capacities towards depth complexity and systems literacy: diffractive reasoning, psychodynamic self-assessment and polysemic awareness.
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The community
This week we will explore how community creates belonging and kinship, and how it can also fracture it (building on lessons learned from the previous week). What, exactly, comprises a community? How does kinship come into this? Can there be community without kinship? What might community mean in the contexts we find ourselves in? How does community go beyond sentimental images of sitting around a campfire? Can we be in community with those who are "not like us"? We will also explore being in community with the more-than-human later in the course. We want to understand how community tugs at the thresholds between the individual and the collective - how does this tension affect the quality of our relationships?