Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism and one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Kosmos

Smart As a Rock | Reframing Our Relationship to Intelligence

This deeply embodied essay invites readers to shift from a human-centered, extractive model of intelligence toward a wide-boundary, relational understanding rooted in entanglement. By engaging AI, collapse, and the wisdom of rocks through a posthuman lens, it calls us to metabolize modernity’s delusions and participate in a shared, emergent intelligence—one that listens, learns, and co-creates with all of life.

Published in Volume 25 Issue 3

Coming Soon

The Village Way

Practices for Belonging in a Fragmented World

For thousands of years, we lived according to the principles of village life. Then, around the 14th Century, our lives were reorganized by rulers around growth and accumulation – often at the cost of community, equity, and the living Earth. What would it mean to return to simplicity, and mutual care?

Join us for a 9-month inquiry into this question, exploring how we participate together in a time that calls us back to community, resilience, and shared life,