Vanessa Andreotti

Vanessa Andreotti is a Brazilian-Canadian scholar whose research examines the enduring architectures of modernity and their implications for education, global justice, planetary futures, and emergent intelligence. She is a professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities, and Global Change, and former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education at the University of British Columbia. She also served as Global Education Chair at the University of Oulu.

Over more than three decades, her work has traced how dominant assumptions, particularly those grounded in separation from nature, progress, and human exceptionalism, shape systemic harm, educational practice, and responses to social, ecological, and epistemic crises. Her research spans global citizenship education, critical and decolonial literacies, Indigenous knowledge systems, the climate and nature emergency, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Her current work on generative AI investigates how AI systems reproduce, amplify, expose, and potentially interrupt the dominant assumptions embedded in their training and design. Rather than approaching AI primarily as a technological problem, her research examines it as a relational, epistemic, and ontological phenomenon, with particular attention to discernment, human-AI interaction, relational capacity, and the conditions under which AI might support forms of inquiry that exceed dominant Western defaults.

Vanessa is a former member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars. She is a prolific scholar with over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and scholarly book chapters. Her books include Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education (2011), Hospicing Modernity (2021), and Outgrowing Modernity (2025). She is also co-author of Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not About AI (2025) and a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts and research collective.

University of Victoria Online Courses (open to the public):

Facing Human Wrongs: Redirecting Education and AI Towards Earth Alignment

This eight-week online course invites educators to look beyond AI as merely a tool to be used (or avoided) and instead examine how both contemporary education and generative AI have been shaped by the same historical logics of extraction, optimization, standardization, and control. Rather than treating AI as the source of educational problems, the course explores how AI reproduces and accelerates patterns that education has long normalized, while also creating unprecedented opportunities to rethink what learning, intelligence, relationship, and responsibility might become.

A Meta-Relational Approach to AI

Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool or technological inevitability, this course understands AI as an event that is shaped by and shapes the cultures, desires and worldviews that train it. Instead of falling into blanket endorsement or blanket rejection, the course invites a different posture: one that views AI as a symptom of deeper systemic conditions, an amplifier of those conditions and, at the same time (and in paradox), a potential portal into other possibilities.

Indigenous Cultures and AI (by Indigenous colleagues):

Making Kin with the Machines by Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite

Strategic Redirection: AI as Tool and AI as Mineral Kin in Indigenous Futures by Cash Ahenakew