Hospicing Modernity at the IIPE

An experimental role play workshop

The last surreal sunset from our hotel outside Kathmandu, IIPE 2024

“Dreams are a message from the deep.”

-Dune, my in-flight entertainment returning home from IIPE 2024

Dear dreamers,

Prism of Wisdom was born after we (Stephanie + Minna) met at the International Institute on Peace Education (IIPE) in Mexico in 2022. It only seems fitting that today’s post would share about my IIPE 2024 workshop on our shared obsession (and series of recent posts Minna has been offering) on Hospicing Modernity, the concept and book by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.

This year’s conference was in Nepal, which for me is about a 12-hour time difference (read: significant jet lag). Disrupted sleep all week meant my dreams were few and far between, so there was not an organic repeat of the 2022 breakfast dream table (not that it could be repeated!).

The theme of this year’s conference was navigating the tensions between tradition and modernity, and I was invited to give a workshop about hospicing modernity. At IIPE 2022 I had offered a workshop based on one of the exercises from the book (the co-sensing with radical tenderness poem). I saw this as an opportunity to be experimental.

This year, I developed a workshop based on the book’s title, the crux of which was a role play. I asked for volunteers to play modernity, who would take on the role of enacting modernity in its final stages of life. The rest of the group acted as death doulas, listening to modernity and the lessons it had to offer, bearing witness, offering care and comfort. The role play consisted of three stages: first, when modernity had been given a terminal diagnosis but was still conscious/able to speak; second, modernity in its final throes as the doulas offer witnessing, presence, and comfort; and third, modernity takes its last breath and the doulas grieve.

It was powerful to witness the different ways that modernity presented itself, from acting aloof to running in circles, and the ways the doulas responded, including a rendition of “The Wheels on the Bus.” The role play spanned a wide range of emotions, from deep tears to hilarity.

From our learning harvest after the role play, participants noted it offered a different perspective on modernity, from something that previously had felt more analytical and intellectual to something - someone - alive and embodied. Doulas noted feeling lost, ambiguity, fear, a lack of control, and the limitations of the role. They also noted the need to be persistent in the practice of their role. Those playing modernity noted how the touch slowed them down (when being reached out and touched by a doula), how not doing had a strong effect, and that being witnessed was powerful.

We did not have time to begin birthing something new -the birth doula work - but I would urge that we cannot rush too quickly into this part of the process. As Vanessa Machado de Oliveria writes in Hospicing Modernity, we risk suffocating the new world(s) with our projections and desires that are still rooted in modernity if we do not hospice it fully. Rather than imagine the new world, I invited participants to think of questions they would ask it.

Some questions that arise at the end of the workshop:

How can we look at modernity as if it were a loved one?
What happens when we really look at modernity as a living system rather than as a theory or analytical framework?
How might we offer our touch, our witnessing, our presence to this process?
What questions can you offer the new world that is struggling to be born?

Another step we didn’t have time for was to write a eulogy for modernity, which is a prompt I offer you to close todeay. How would you honor this complex living system with words?

With curiosity,

Stephanie

Stephanie Knox Steiner, PhD is an enchantress, mother-scholar, dreamworker, community weaver, and peace educator who currently lives and teaches at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has been writing down her dreams since she was a teenager, and studied community dreamwork as part of her doctoral studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She writes prolifically about enchantment, interbeing, and re-imagining education at her other Substack, Enchantable.