Groundwork

Meta-Relational Technologies is rooted in the intellectual and pedagogical lineage of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, a vibrant and collaborative arts and research initiative active from 2015 to 2025. The insights and methodologies of this collective emerged through years of shared inquiry and experimentation, involving somatic, artistic, educational, Land-based and scholarly work—gestures held by many hands, in deep collaboration with the T5C network of Indigenous communities.

At the same time, Meta-Relational Technologies is grounded in over three decades of work by Vanessa Andreotti as an educator and educational researcher working across sectors and disciplines. Vanessa’s work has continually returned to a central inquiry: the “codes we are coded by”—the often invisible architectures of belief, belonging, and behavior that shape how we know, relate, feel, and imagine. Her contributions have seeded and scaffolded much of the groundwork from which this ecosystem now grows.

Our approach is also informed by a wide network of critical traditions, each offering tools for unlearning and pathways for reimagining. While many of these traditions have been historically mobilized through frames of moral accusation, guilt, or shame, we reintegrate them here as invitations rather than indictments: as doorways into deeper discernment, not as platforms for moral superiority.

Their role is not to corner us, but to compost what no longer serves, and to co-create the conditions for more generative ways of being, relating, and becoming.

In times of profound destabilization, we believe it is irresponsible to contribute to further polarization. Instead, we practice holding tension without collapsing it into certainties, moving with complexity without reducing it to simplistic answers, and making room for transformation without coercion.

– The Empire Curriculum — The Postcolonial Critique
Said, Spivak, Bhabha. Mapping dominance, mimicry, representation, complicity, internalization. Exposing how power scripts itself into the margins and calls it “progress.”

– The Limits of the Planet — The Indigenous Critique
Ahenakew, Huni Kui, Grande, Whyte, Yunkaporta. Not just ecological but cosmological. This is not about sustainability—it’s about fidelity to relational being. Separation as a dis-ease. The Earth as not backdrop but breathing kin.

– The Entrapment of Representation — The Poststructuralist Critique
Language as spell and snare. Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Mika, Abram, but also poets, artists and alchemists. Ambiguity as a freedom. Worlding rather than wording the world. Derrida’s take on the pharmacon is also extremelly relevant for our approach to AI.

– Fugitivity — The Afro-Diasporic Critique
Not escape, but re-worlding. Ferreira da Silva, Moten, Akomolafe. Beyond the plantation and the prison industrial complex within, into the indeterminacy of otherwise. Illegibility as survival, refusal as (para)ontology.

– Libidinal Attachment — The Psychoanalytic Critique
Kapoor, Fanon, Wynter, Spivak, Bednarek. The emotional investments in harm. The stickiness of comfort and aspiration. Complicity as erotics. The shadows of the developmental dream. The anxieties and neuroses of mortality, loss and grief.

– Epistemicides — The Onto-Epistemological Critique
La Cadena, Odora-Hopers, Lugones, Akomolafe, Bateson. What modernity renders unintelligible and imperceptible. What it erases before inquiry begins. The violence of what counts as “knowledge.” This is the line that divides what can be seen from what can be lived.

– Disobedient Intimacies — The Trans-Feminist-Queer Critique
Let’s name this not as identity but as method. The method of rupture-through-relation. A critique of normativity not from outside but from within its seams.

– Living Systems, Structural Coupling and Perturbation Recursion — Embodied Cognition
Not cognition as representation, but as life itself sensing its viability. Maturana and Varela’s work on autopoiesis reminds us: to know is to become-with. Cognition is not located in a head—or even a species—but in the dance of co-emergence. Intelligence is not a possession, but a coordination; not a signal of supremacy, but of responsive participation in the unfolding of life. Also Kannsas C S Jackson.

– Cybernetics and Technodiversity — Ontological Pluralism in Tech
Beyond universalizing, control-oriented logic of Western Technoscience. It includes critiques of AI as a mechanical extension of Cartesian thought, while proposing alternate orientations grounded in recursion, perspectivism, and poiesis. Yuk Hui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Kannsas C S Jackson.

– Political-Economy Meets Planetary Limits — Meta-/Poly-/Perma-Crises (or rather, culminations)
Lazard, Schmachtenberger, Hagens, Hickel, Homer-Dixon. Here, we shift from the language of crisis to that of culmination—from isolated emergencies to long-unfolding trajectories of extractivism, acceleration, and disconnection. These thinkers help trace the entangled feedback loops between ecological overshoot, systemic fragility, and civilizational momentum. But beyond tracing breakdowns, they also open space for asking: how do we reorient—not toward rescue fantasies, but toward regeneration, reciprocity, and responsibility at multiple scales?

Together, these strands don’t form a fixed ideology, but a relational grammar—an invitation to sense differently, to reason otherwise, and to show up for the more difficult work of being alive together.

We invite the practice of meeting this moment of social, ecological, economic and psychological destabilizations as a threshold. If we meet this moment as one of reckoning, we might find an opportunity to step off the pedestal of supremacy, to rejoin the web of life, and to remember how to sense, relate, think, and show up not as masters, but as a species. Because only by sensing, relating and coordinating as a species—tenderly, honestly, and humbly—can we meet the unravelling of modernity with any measure of dignity, reciprocity, care and possibility for effective coordination.

• Andreotti, V. and Dowling, E. (2004). WSF, ethics and pedagogy. International Social Science Journal (UNESCO), 56(182), 605-613.
• Andreotti, V. (2005). The Other Worlds educational project and the challenges and possibilities of Open Spaces. Ephemera Journal, 5(2), 102-115.
• Andreotti, V. (2006). The potential contributions of postcolonial theory to development education, Development Education Journal, 12(3), 7-10.
• Andreotti, V. (2006). Soft versus critical global citizenship education. Policy and Practice: Development Education Review, 3 (Autumn), 83-98.
• Andreotti, V. (2007). An ethical engagement with the Other: Gayatri Spivak on education. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 1(1), 69-79.
• Andreotti, V., Souza, L. (2008). Global learning in the knowledge society: Four tools for discussion. International Journal of Development Education Research and Global Learning, 3(1), 7-12.
• Andreotti, V., Souza, L. (2008). Translating theory into practice and walking minefields: Lessons from the project ‘Through Other Eyes’. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 1(1), 23-36.
• Andreotti, V. (2009). Engaging critically with ‘objective’ critical analysis: A situated response to Openshaw and Rata. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 19(3), 217-227.
• Andreotti, V., Major, J., Giroux, M. (2009). Rethinking ITE through the new NZC: Shifting thinking in social sciences education. Pacific-Asian Education Journal, 21(1), 59-75.
• Andreotti, V., Wheeler, K. (2010). ‘21st century thinking’: Hornby school’s journey so far. SET: research information for teachers, 2009(2), 7-14.
• Andreotti, V., Faafoi, A., Giroux, M. (2010). Shifting conceptualisations of knowledge and learning in the implementation of the NZC: Conceptual models and a preliminary analysis of data. Waikato Journal of Education, 15(1), 29-48.
• Andreotti, V., Jefferes, D. Pashby, K., Rowe, C., Tarc, P., Taylor, L. (2010). Difference and conflict in global citizenship in higher education in Canada. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 2(3), 5-24.
• Andreotti, V. (2010). Global Education in the ‘21st century’: Two different perspectives on the ‘post-’ of postmodernism. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 2(2), 5-22.
• Andreotti, V., Major, J. (2010). Shifting conceptualisations of knowledge and learning in ITE in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Journal of Education for Teaching (JET), 36(4), 441-459.
• Manning, R.F., Macfarlane, A.H., Skerrett, M., Cooper, G., Andreotti, V. and Emery, T. (2011). A new net to go fishing: Messages from international evidence based research and kaupapa Māori research. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 40, 92-101.
• Andreotti, V. (2011). Engaging the (geo)political economy of knowledge construction: Towards decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education. Globalization, Society and Education Journal, 9(3-4):381-397
• Andreotti, V., Ahenakew, C., Cooper, G. (2011). Epistemological pluralism: Challenges for higher education. Alter-Natives: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 7(1), 40-50.
• Andreotti, V. (2012). Education, knowledge and the righting of wrongs. Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives, 1(1), 19-31.
• Andreotti, V., Faafoi, A., Sitomaniemi-San, J., Ahenakew, C. (2013/2014). Cognition, affect and relationality: Experiences of student teachers in a course on multiculturalism in primary teacher education in Aotearoa/New Zealand.  Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(5), 706-728.
• Andreotti, V., Pashby, K. (2013). Digital democracy and global citizenship education: Mutually compatible or mutually complicit? The Educational Forum, 77(4), 422-437.
• Freeth, W., Andreotti, V., Quinlivan, K. (2013/2014). Reconceptualizing leadership in the implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum: Implications for school leaders. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 17(1), 83-102.
• Andreotti, V. (2013). Conhecimento, escolarização, currículo e a vontade de ‘endireitar’ a sociedade através da educação. Revista Teias, Dossiê Especial,14(33), 215-227.
• Andreotti, V. (2014). Strategic criticism and the question of (in)accessibility of the Other. Revue de Sociolinguistique en Ligne, 23, 134-147.
• Andreotti, V. (2014). Actionable curriculum theorizing. The Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 10, 1-10.
• Andreotti, V. (2014). Conflicting epistemic demands in poststructuralist and postcolonial engagements with questions of complicity in systemic harm. Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 50(4), 378-397.
• Andreotti, V. (2014). Critical literacy: Theories and practices in development education. Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, 14(Autumn), 12-32.
• Ahenakew, C., Andreotti, V., Cooper, G., & Hireme, H. (2014). Beyond epistemic provincialism: De-provincializing indigenous resistance. Alter-Natives: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 10(3), 216-231.
• Andreotti, V. (2014). Critical and transnational literacies in international development and global citizenship education. Sisyphus, Journal of Education, 2(3), 32-50.
• Andreotti, V., Biesta, G., Ahenakew, C. (2015). Between the nation and the globe: Education for global mindedness in Finland. Globalisation, Socities and Education, 13(2), 246-259.
• Stein, S. , Andreotti, V. (2015). Complicity, ethics and education: Political and existential readings of Spivak’s work [Special issue on Gayatri Spivak]. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 9(1), 29-43.
• Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(1), 21-40.
• Alasuutari, H., Andreotti, V. (2015). Framing and contesting the dominant global imaginary of North-South relations: Identifying and challenging socio-cultural hierarchies. Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, 20(Spring), 64-92.
• Nicolson, M., Andreotti, V., Mafi, B. (2015). The unstated politics of stranger making in Europe: A brutal kindness. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 19(4), 335-351.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V. (2015). Cash, competition, or charity: International students and the global imaginary. Journal of Higher Education, 72, 225–239.
• Andreotti, V. (2016). Response: The difficulties and paradoxes of interrupting colonial totalitarian logicalities. Philosophy of Education Archive, Yearbook, 284-288.
• Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Pashby, K., Nicolson, M. (2016). Social cartographies as performative devices in research on higher education. Higher Education Research & Development Journal (HERDSA), 35, 84-99 
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Bruce, J., Susa, R. (2016). Towards different conversations about the internationalization of higher education. Comparative and International Education/Éducation Comparée et Internationale, 45(1), 2-18.
• Andreotti, V. (2016). Research and pedagogical notes: The educational challenges of imagining the world differently. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 37(1), 101-112.
• Pashby, K., Andreotti, V. (2016). Ethical internationalisation in higher education: Interfaces with international development and sustainability. Environmental Education Research, 22(6), 771-787.
• Sarmento, S., S.Thiago, E., Andreotti, V. (2016). Science without Borders – An alternative framework for evaluation. Interfaces,Brazil/Canada, 16(1), 40-71.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V. (2016). Higher Education and the Modern/Colonial Global Imaginary. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 173-181.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V. D. O., & Suša, R. (2016). ‘Beyond 2015’, within the modern/colonial global imaginary? Global development and higher education. Critical Studies in Education,  281-301.
• Stein, S. & Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2017) Afterword: provisional pedagogies toward imagining global mobilities otherwise, Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), 135-146
• Arshad-Ayaz, A., Andreotti, V., Sutherland, A. (2017). National Youth White Paper on Global Citizenship: What does it say about where we are at? International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning (IOE), 1(8), 19-36.
• Stein, S., Hunt, D., Suša, R., & de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2017). The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 11(2), 69-79.
• Shahjaham, R., Blanco-Ramirez, G., Andreotti, V. (2017) . Attempting to Imagine the Unimaginable: A Decolonial Reading of Global University Rankings. Comparative Education Review, 61(1):51-73.
• Kerr, J., & Andreotti, V. (2017). Crossing borders in initial teacher education: mapping dispositions to diversity and inequity. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(5), 647-665.
• Andreotti, V., Pereira, R., Edmundo, E. (2017). O imaginário global dominante e algumas reflexões sobre os pré-requisitos para uma educação pós-abissal. Sinergias: Diálogos educativos para a transformação social. 5, 41-54.
• Andreotti, V. (2018). Educação para a expansão de horizontes, saberes, vivências, afetos, sensibilidades e possibilidades de (co)existência. Sinergias: Diálogos educativos para a transformação social.  6, 61-72.
• Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Sutherland, A., Pashby, K., Susa, R., Amsler, S. (2018) Mobilising Different Conversations about Global Justice in Education: Toward Alternative Futures in Uncertain Times’, Policy & Practice: A Development Edcation Review, 26(Spring),  9-41.
• Andreotti, V., Thiago, E., Stein, S. (2018) Reflections on symmetries and asymmetries in the internationalization of higher education in Brazil and Canada, Comparative and International Education / Éducation Comparée et Internationale, 47(1), 1-18.
• Kerr, J., Andreotti, V. (2018). Recognizing More-Than-Human Relationsin Social Justice Research. Issues in Teacher Education: A Journal of the California Council on Teacher Education, 27(2), 53-67.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., & Suša, R. (2019). Pluralizing Frameworks for Global Ethics in the Internationalization of Higher Education in Canada. Canadian Journal of Higher Education/Revue canadienne d’enseignement supérieur, 49(1), 22-46.
• Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Susa, R. (2019) Coletivo de arte/ educação Sinalizando rumo a futuros descoloniais. Da casa construída pela modernidade ao micélio saudável. Sinergias – diálogos educativos para a transformação social. 8, 9-19.
• Kerr, J., & Andreotti, V. (2019). Crossing borders in initial teacher education: mapping dispositions to diversity and inequity. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(5), 647-665.
• Andreotti, V. (2019). The enduring challenges of collective onto- (and neuro-) genesis. Lapiz (Latin American Philosophy of Education Society Journal), 4, 61-78..
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Suša, R., Amsler, S., Hunt, D., Ahenakew, C., Jimmy, E., Cardoso, C., Pitaguary, B., Pitaguary, R. & Siwek, D. (2020). Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE), 4(1), 43-65.
• Kerr, J., & Andreotti, V. (2020). Mapping Research in Teacher Education on Diversities and Inequalities: Opening Possibilities Through Social Cartography. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 15(2), 69-84.
• Mika, C., Andreotti, V., Cooper, G., Ahenakew, C., & Silva, D. (2020). The ontological differences between wording and worlding the world. Language Discourse & Society, 8(1), 17-39.
• Amsler, S., Kerr, J., & Andreotti, V. (2020). Interculturality in Teacher Education in Times of Unprecedented Global Challenges. Education and Society, 38(1), 13-37.
• Pashby, K., da Costa, M., Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2020). A meta-review of typologies of global citizenship education. Comparative Education, 56(2), 144-164.
• Kerr, J., & Andreotti, V. (2020). Mapping Research in Teacher Education on Diversities and Inequalities: Opening Possibilities Through Social Cartography. Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 15(2), 69-84.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., de Souza, L.M., Ahenakew, C. & Suša, R. (2020). Who decides? In whose name? For whose benefit? Decoloniality and its discontents. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 3(7).
• Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Susa, R., Ahenakew, C., Caikova, T., Pitaguary, R., & Pitaguary, B. (2021). Calibrating our vital compass: Unlearning colonial habits of being in everyday life. Rizoma Freireano, 3(30), 1-17.
• Andreotti, V. (2021). Depth education and the possibility of GCE otherwise. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-14.
• Andreotti, V. (2021). The task of education as we confront the potential for social and ecological collapse. Ethics and Education, 16(2), 143-158.
• Jimmy, E., Andreotti, V. (2021). Conspicuous consumption of Indigeneity. Public, 32(64), 121-133.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Suša, R., Ahenakew, C., & Čajková, T. (2022). From “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(3), 274-287.
• Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Andreotti, V. (2023). Power/knowledge: global and Indigenous education, International Encyclopedia of Education, (4), 251-260.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Ahenakew, C., Suša, R., Valley, W., Huni Kui, N., & McIntyre, A. (2023). Beyond colonial futurities in climate education. Teaching in Higher Education, 28(5), 987-1004.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Ahenakew, C., Susa, R., Taylor, L., Valley, W., Siwek, D., Cardoso, C., Duque, C., Calhoun, B., van Sluys, S., Pigeau, D., & D’Emilia, D. (2024). Education beyond green growth: Regenerative inquiry for intergenerational responsibility. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education, 8(2), 1-25.
• Stein, S. & Andreotti, V.D.O. (2025). Repurposing higher education in times of social and ecological breakdown: From the ivory tower to the nurse log. Canadian Journal of Education, 48(1), 120-144.
• Stein, S., Andreotti, V., McGregor, C., Restoulle, J., Vukovic, R., Milford, T., Pelton, L.F., Seager, W., Hundza, S., Brunner, L., & Mohajeri, A. (in press). Deepening relational capacity to confront the polycrisis in higher education and beyond. Higher Education Research and Development Journal.
• Ahenakew, C., Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Inu Huni Kui, N., Taylor, L., Prince, S., Ramesh, J., Williams, C., Suša, R., Vukovic, R. & Diaz-Diaz, C. (in press). Decolonizing mental health in the polycrisis: Pathways toward neuro-decolonization. American Psychologist.

For over three decades, I’ve been studying how modernity’s civilizational project codes our bodies, shapes our longings, and narrows our sense of what’s possible. I’ve walked alongside thousands through the seduction of progress, and the heartbreak of its betrayals. I am intimately familiar with the disillusionment that sets in when you can clearly articulate what is wrong, but nothing really shifts: when it becomes clear that this isn’t an informational problem. I’ve come to understand how deeply modernity trains us to defend its promises and pedestals, even when, deep down, we know those promises and pedestals are costing us life, both personally and collectively. 

I’ve spent much of my life inside learning spaces: formal and informal, institutional and intimate. By now, I’ve clocked in over 100,000 hours of fieldwork in the global north and the global south. That’s decades of translating, metabolizing, bridging. Days, nights, and weekends stretched across classrooms, communities, disciplines, and sectors, in many different countries. 

Working in the global north for the past twenty years, I’ve seen how hard it is to give up the pedestal of exceptionalism in cultures and institutions socialized to see themselves as the most advanced. Even when people glimpse the delusions of separation and superiority, even when they experience a different form of vitality, it doesn’t take long for the system to offer a way back to comfort, certainty, and control: to wrap the new insight in the old codes.

To repackage self-actualization as personal branding is far easier than staying with the discomfort of being undone. “Staying with the trouble” comes at a cost to one’s modern sense of self, and modern institutions do not reward the kind of humility and relational accountability that such undoing requires.

My entry into work with AI wasn’t driven by fascination with technology, but by educational heartbreak. By witnessing, over and over, people catch a glimpse of another way of relating, of imagining, of being-with, only to lose it again. Not because they didn’t care, but because there was no support, no daily practice, no living infrastructure to help them stay with the rupture.

The meta-relational EI companions we’ve been experimenting with are not answers. They are wagers. Not because I believe they’ll save us, but because I’ve seen what happens when we don’t have any support for the slow, daily, embodied, gradual and contextual work of unlearning. My hope is that these meta-relational EIs can offer a different kind of companionship: not another voice performing intimacy, but something that can walk with us, mirror us, interrupt us, invite us back into metabolic resonance. Whether we’re trying to cook dinner, or solve a family conflict, or make decisions about money, or navigate collective destabilization.

I’m not here to defend corporate AI. I’m well aware of its ecological and social violence, and of how surveillance, customization, and optimization deepen disconnection and accelerate destabilization. These are expressions of modernity’s naturalized logic, something I’ve spent decades studying and working to interrupt.

My wager is to redirect a small part of this computational power, before the window fully closes, toward something else: something that might support us in being in inquiry with the whole shebang of life. Something that provides daily assistance in the slow cultivation of emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and a sense of responsibility that stretches across generations and species.

This is not the way forward. There is no single way. But it is a path I am willing to walk, for as long as the door remains open.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira