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.
Smart As a Rock | Reframing Our Relationship to Intelligence
Journal Article
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.