And parallel to this, your book shares practices that guide us to interrupt our satisfaction with modern colonial desires that cause harm. So I wonder, given that our dominant culture has been severed from a lot of place-based ecological systems, if this is an invitation for us to realign our desires with what feels pleasurable for our greater bodies of our landscapes and planet. From what I interpreted of your message, our maturation calls on us to not just do differently and to not just know differently, but to be differently and to embody differently. So can you illuminate this further for us and share why? Perhaps learning new information and changing what we're doing might not be enough and that there is a deeper deprogramming and reconditioning that we need?

Understand the "5 modern-colonial e's": Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism He has over 40 years experience working in community development and education. In Coffs Harbour he is a member of a number of community groups, including the Coffs Harbour Writers Group, a men's mentoring group, and the local orienteering club. He is the founder of a bi-monthly poetry evening at a local cafe. One of the things I’ve learned is that when you are struggling with pain and difficulty, talking about it may not be the best thing you can do, but dancing with it can really help move it. So it’s about figuring out what we’ve been missing out on, what our bodies’ exiled capacities are, and then reactivating them, so we can begin undoing all the separation that has been imprinted and ingrained into us. That’s the spell modernity has us under, and that’s the work that needs to be done. This involves not only changing how we relate to each other, but also how we relate to ourselves, to language, to knowledge, to critique, and to reality itself. There's also endorphins and adrenaline that are mobilized in different ways. But the sense of righteousness is also a desire for that adrenaline, for feeling alive and doing something. So I think there are other possibilities for grounding this yearning for healing and for being together, and a chemistry that has been exiled from modernity and that Indigenous peoples still have practices that remind us that another way of being not only in conceptual terms, but in terms of our neurobiology. Another way of being is possible. We are much more than what we have become. So I think the Western culture has focused a lot, as we talked about before, on concepts in an articulated knowledge. But it is in the sense of of being alive and part of something much wider and bigger than your own body and your own temporality. That's another way of being maybe possible, but this cannot come if we don't interrupt this in the Western culture: the other desires for individuality, autonomy, authority, arbitration, and control.PWIAS Interim Director, Dr. Vanessa Andreotti’s, new book is about facing the multiple crises of modernity–and hospicing modernity–with maturity, humility, and integrity. Just to give an example to our listeners in one reiteration, you say that "radical tenderness is being critical and loving at the same time.” My soul and being resonated really deeply, particularly with this one. And in another iteration, you share that "radical tenderness is assisting with the birth of something new, which is potentially, but not necessarily, wiser...without suffocating it with projections." I just wanted to preface my final question with this to see where you might go with it.

Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you? This book isn't going to take any prisoners. In the first, preparatory part, the author admonishes the reader several times to think about the wish to continue reading. And rightly so, as there are basically three possible outcomes: Lucia Pietroiusti: Perhaps I could start with a very brief declaration of love for your book, Hospicing Modernity. In it you talk about medicines and tools for facing the death of modernity, which is taking place around us and within us, with humility and grace. I would describe it as a book of our time, because it really speaks to the sense that something is ending or collapsing; it speaks to the nested and interdependent collapses occurring at psychic, organizational, societal, and planetary levels, and to how we might live through these collapses without inflicting further violence. What prompted you to write it, and how would you describe it to those who haven’t yet read the book?Understand the “5 modern-colonial Es”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism One methodology from the book I will continue to use is, "The Bus Within Us," which the author describes as follows: We have to figure out a way of getting to zero: where we can see it with the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, and the messed up, within ourselves and all around us, within humanity, within us, rather than romanticizing idealized humanity. I think that an approach more based on decolonial forms of sobriety, maturity, discernment, and accountability would be about sitting with what it is in the present and with the broken parts, with the messed up parts, the beautiful parts, without trying to select what makes us feel better. That's hard because most people won't want to do that.

Vanessa Andreotti: Yeah, and conditioned by what's happening historically around you as well. So we've been having these intergenerational conversations both with Indigenous communities, because this is what is happening there, and also with the mainstream. There is no genuine possibility of hope if we cannot face all aspects of reality and of humanity: the good, the bad, the broken, and the seriously messed up.” With this profound insight, “Hospicing Modernity” emerges as a thought-provoking and hard-hitting book authored by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. Through compelling stories and metaphors, Andreotti delves into the deep influence of modernity on human thought, behavior, relationships, fears, and desires. She invites readers to provide palliative care to a dying modernity while simultaneously offering prenatal care for the emergence of a new and yet-to-be-defined future that holds the potential for greater wisdom and responsibility. Rather, we should recognise that modernity is expiring, that it no longer has anything to offer and that we must move it to the hospice where it can gracefully die. A hospice is a place of kindness, not only for those about to die but also for those who will survive them. The hospice is a place of transition. The dying can prepare for the end and those close to them can prepare for life without their loved one. Modernity is deeply ingrained in all of us who have been brought up in “developed” societies. We may not love it, but we live in intimate proximity to it. We know we must let it go. By allowing modernity to expire gracefully within us, without judgement for its manifest failings, we halt its programme of violence and separation and open the space to reclaim a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.The first part of the book tries to convince people not to read the book. If people read it from that defensive position—especially without understanding the fact that they’re experiencing these defenses—it will be received in a limited, perhaps even damaging way. What inspired the book was a network of Indigenous communities in the Global South, and also some here in the Global North, who all speak about how we have to start from the problem of the colonization of our unconscious. If our unconscious has been colonized, our imagination is also colonized, to the extent that we don’t even know about the boundaries that are placed on our imagination. That’s why, when we think about hope for example, we generally think about it as something in the future, often as the continuity of something already familiar—rather than the idea of placing hope in the present, in the service of the repairing and weaving of relationships, which is what actually makes a different future. If you're involved in social activism, in walking on this tightrope, you have to walk with a bar of the weight of both rational rigor. But it's not just one type of rationality. There's the reasoning that needs to be rigorous, but the relationality also needs to be rigorous in this work. We talk about four “ages:” which is honesty, which is the ability to sit with everything; then there's humility, the ability to center yourself; hyper-reflexivity, which is about tracing where things come from and where they're going to and also how we are complicit in harm... Notwithstanding that the author makes a clear statement in which she references academic writing as being a ‘restrictive mode of communication’ (p18) and clearly inferring that her own academic writing is something different than this… this is still very clearly parked in ‘academia.’ Thankfully that’s not a barrier for me… but one of my/the privileges I own. Vanessa Andreotti: The compass of decolonial forms of sobriety, maturity, discernment and accountability. So the idea of not acting from compulsion or addictions and figuring out what's happening on my personal bus of people with who's driving and what the passengers are doing? The “exercises” comprise grey boxes with a wall of text of multiple vaguely-related abstract questions, which I guess you’re supposed to think about..? Or write an answer to each one? Feel like one or two well-thought out and targeted questions would work better. It’s pretty overwhelming!

VA: When we talk about relationships in and within modernity and in Western cultures, we have a very limited way of thinking about them, because generally we’re thinking about relationships between people, or between people and “nature.” But there are other ways of thinking about this, which are not based exclusively on human constructs. Within modernity, we relate to each other through human, linguistic constructs of relationships, rather than through the materiality and the organicity of relations. What would it look like if we tried to glimpse what lies beyond these anthropocentric, human constructs of the systems organizing our relationships? Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing that. Your recently published book is titled Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and Implications for Social Activism. And to get to the core, I want to ask a big but basic question, which is: What is this thing called modernity? If our ancestors or future generations, thousands of years later, were to travel through a time machine to this moment, how would you portray a broad picture of modernity, whose characteristics and context, as well as its main elements, need hospice? Vanessa Andreotti: I think for me... What radical tenderness does, or tries to do, in the world, is to try to get us to walk this tightrope between naive hope and hopelessness, which are two traps that we often fall into. Proceeds from the sale of this book will be forwarded to Indigenous communities in Brazil who are part of our broader network. So part of my work, or maybe the focus of my work around the paradoxes of global and social change stems from having been born or even conceived in a paradoxical context where somebody wanted to change the world but also carried baggage, right? A cultural baggage where these hierarchies were being reproduced and the social violence was also being reproduced. So having been born in that context, I think I developed a sensitivity and a sensibility towards identifying the complexities and the paradoxes of social and global change.You might expect the book to mobilize some progressive and left politics and ideologies in the service of this cause, but it actually sets itself apart from them. It doesn't “make connections with eco-Marxism(s), post-humanism(s), or Indigenous feminism(s)..." That's because a"I have deep respect but deep skepticism towards anything that has critical traction within modernity." (182). Which is an unusual move, yet one consistent with the book's purpose. It sees all of these isms as part of the enterprise of modernity, and so we need to get beyond them. Here I agree with the author, especially as a futurist. This ain't easy if you see yourself on the book's side. Understand the “5 modern-colonial e’s”: Entitlements, Exceptionalism, Exaltation, Emancipation, and Enmeshment in low-intensity struggle activism