Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism

meta-analytical tools that map the ways we approach change can be useful in inviting people to exercise self-reflexivity in relation to their own theories of change and in relation to how they share their theories of change in conversations with others.

That is why stamina, humor, flexibility, and resilience are required for those who want to do this work in the long haul.

Modernity predetermines what can be heard; what can be deemed real and possible; what can be imagined as desirable and ideal; and how we are supposed to feel, behave, and communicate within these parameters. This conditioning is precognitive—it is faster than thought itself as it structures our unconscious.

the omnipresence and value attached to the yellow corncobs (as an effect of universalism), curtailing our imagination and preventing us from even imagining the existence of other possibilities.

Right from the beginning, I noticed that many people avoided the topic if it was approached logically and directly (e.g., with hard data). I observed built-in resistance in our cognitive and affective circuits that rendered questioning modernity counterintuitive and uncomfortable. This in turn generated defensive responses when people were prompted

In this sense, coloniality represents a global hegemonic form of power that organizes bodies, time, knowledge, relationships, labor, and space according to economic parameters (i.e., exchange value) and to the benefit of particular groups of people, with or without formal colonization.

Within modernity, maturity is associated with the rule of mind and reason over emotions and the body. This mature self should be unified in a coherent personality (i.e., under control) that sees both the world and itself objectively (i.e., with self-transparency).

Recentering: Privileging the feelings, experiences, and perspectives of oneself and/or the majority group/nation/etc. rather than looking at systemic dynamics of inequality and violence, and discerning from there the actions needed to work toward developing healthier possibilities for coexistence (e.g.,

Emotions are usually perceived to be abstract concepts rather than physiological manifestations. In an attempt to interrupt this tendency, we prefer to use the term affect to emphasize the fact that these physical sensations happen through and in between our bodies, and that their manifestations are much more complex than the meanings we usually at