Vanessa Andreotti

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is Professor and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, where she leads the Meta-Relationality and AI Research initiative. A former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education, her work brings together education, decolonial thought, Indigenous knowledge systems, ecology and artificial intelligence to explore how different assumptions about reality, knowledge and relationality shape both human institutions and computational systems.

Her current research project, Meta-Relationality and AI: Discernment, Fields, and Relational Capacity in AI Systems, investigates how AI models inherit cultural assumptions embedded in the data on which they are trained, and explores the conditions under which these systems might support more relational, context-sensitive and Earth-aligned forms of discernment. Rather than treating questions of safety, alignment and governance as sufficient, the project examines the deeper assumptions about intelligence, knowledge and value that contemporary AI both reproduces and reveals.

Vanessa has published more than 100 scholarly articles and has worked internationally across higher education, philanthropy, civil society and Indigenous communities on questions of global justice, global citizenship, critical literacies, ecological responsibility and institutional transformation.