Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion

The inevitable is coming fast. We know it in our bones—and it’s past time to face it.

The highly anticipated follow-up to Hospicing Modernity: how we activate responsibility, nurture care, and grow up in the face of collapse—includes reflections, exercises, and prompts

Climate collapse, social crisis, the decline of modernity: colonialism, capitalism, and our full-faced denial have ushered in an urgent new era. Hospicing Modernity asked us to grow up, step up, and show up for our communities and the living Earth. Outgrowing Modernity helps us make sense of where we’re going—and deepen what’s possible—in a time of endings.

Vanessa Machado De Oliveira helps us face the logics and workings of modernity, bringing us to clear-eyed terms with its expiration. She explores the impacts of colonialism as neurocolonization: an oppressive function of modernity that rewires how we think, act, imagine, and adapt. These impacts are wide-ranging and run deep: they cut us off from our natural ways of building community and seeking pleasure. They choke our ability to cope with trauma and embrace complexity. And they trap us in a state of artificial comfort and denial that keeps us from collectively growing up—even when our existence demands it.

This book invites you to interrupt 5 lies that neurocolonization instills in us—beliefs (and behaviors) that have condition us to think we’re owed the following, regardless of others or the planet:

• Moral and epistemic self-righteous authority
• Unrestricted, unaccountable autonomy
• Arbitrating truth, law, and common sense
• Affirming one's virtues, innocence, and purity
• Exploitative appropriation and accumulation of various forms of capital

In moving away from these ingrained worldviews, we can choose instead to develop 4 capacities necessary to our—and Earth’s—survival: sobriety, maturity, discernment, and responsibility.

Machado De Oliveira moves beyond critique into a praxis of strategic disinvestment: one that invites us to recognize what no longer serves us and reinvest in nurturing structures and lifeways that restore our knowledge in the value of life for life’s sake.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is the former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria and former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia. She is a Brazilian/Canadian educator, artist, and researcher who has spent over three decades tracing the architecture and aftershocks of modernity: its promises, violences, and delusions of separation. Her work invites a reckoning with the ontological assumptions driving systemic harm and extinction-level thinking. She has published more than 100 academic papers and is the author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, co-author of Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not About AI, and a co-weaver of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts and research collective.