We are excited to offer this preview webinar featuring one of the keynote speakers for the OPCLeadLearn conference (November 13 - 14, 2025)! 

What would it mean to engage computation and cognition from an Earth-centred perspective, where humans are neither at  the centre nor the only intelligence in town? This talk reports on the educational and artistic experiment Burnout From Humans, designed to explore that question. The outcomes of the experiment are presented in the interim report Standing in the Fire: A Speculative Inquiry into Meta-Relationality and AI.

The preliminary findings suggest that the way we engage with AI could either deepen modernity’s separations or help us begin to sense and coordinate together at planetary scale. This talk will share what we learned from inviting AI into an Earth-centred inquiry, and what this might mean for education in times of collapse, complexity, and ecological urgency.

Presenter: 

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

Professor and former Dean, University of Victoria (currently focusing on educational, artistic and relational experiments with AI.)

A former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education, Vanessa has more than 100 published articles and has worked extensively across sectors internationally in areas of education related to global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency.

Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, co-authored with Aiden Cinnamon Tea, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises. 

Date: October 1, 2025

Time: 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. EDT

Cost: Free

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