Keynotes & Workshops
Meet the keynote conversationalists and workshop leaders joining us for the Pedagogies of Hope in Higher Education symposium. Programme details and session times will be added as the full programme is confirmed.
Keynote conversationalists
Professor Wendy Steele
Wendy Steele is a writer, activist and educator working at the nexus of environmental humanities and critical social sciences. She is Director of the Planetary Civics Inquiry at RMIT and researches cities and climate change, planetary commons, climate activism, urban infrastructures, and the possibilities of the living university as a transformative agenda in higher education.
Dr Leonora Souza Paula
Leonora Souza Paula specialises in Literary Studies and Latin American Studies, focusing on race, gender, memory and Black geographies in contemporary Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Diasporic culture. Her current research examines Black spatial imagination, heritage recovery and epistemic reparation. She is an ACLS fellow, co-founder of Black Women Shaping AfroFutures, and director of the AfroFutures Now Digital Archive.
Dr George Veletsianos
George Veletsianos is Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and Bonnie Westby Huebner Chair in Education and Technology. His work asks how we can design exceptional online and blended learning, how educators and students negotiate emerging technologies, and what futures higher education might proactively create.
Associate Professor Te Hurinui Karaka-Clarke
Te Hurinui Karaka-Clarke (Te Arawa, Ngāi Tahu) is Associate Professor of Mātauranga Māori in Kura Toi Tangata School of Education and Associate Dean Academic for the University of Waikato’s Division of Education. His teaching and research focus on culturally sustaining pedagogy, language revitalisation, equitable and authentic assessment, and the critical use of generative AI in education.
Professor Chris Eames
Chris Eames is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Waikato. He teaches pre-service teacher education and supervises research in environmental and sustainability education. His current work focuses particularly on climate change education and what curriculum in this field could look like in Aotearoa New Zealand and elsewhere.
Dr Adreanne Ormond
Adreanne Ormond (Rongomaiwāhine, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is a Māori academic at Victoria University of Wellington. Growing up on the Māhia Peninsula on the ancestral lands of her whānau and iwi shapes her scholarship, which is grounded in Kaupapa Māori and centres Māori ways of knowing and being as legitimate and vital foundations for education and research.
Dr Jessica Riddell
Jessica Riddell is a Full Professor at Bishop’s University in Québec and the inaugural Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence. She is known for reimagining universities as public institutions oriented toward human and ecological flourishing, is founder of the Hope Circuits Institute, and is author of Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities for Human Flourishing.
Professor Emeritus John Forester
John Forester has a lifelong interest in the politics and ethics of community planning practice, including participatory action research, mediation and dispute resolution, practical judgment and improvisation. His books include Planning in the Face of Power, The Deliberative Practitioner and How Spaces Become Places. He is currently completing The Gift of Listening: Paying Attention to What Matters.
Dr Florencia Rojo
Florencia Rojo is an Assistant Professor of Social Relations and Policy at James Madison College, Michigan State University. Her research examines how race, food and immigration shape experiences of inequality and community life, drawing on qualitative, community-based and place-based methods. Her teaching emphasises experiential and community-engaged learning.
Dr Bea Rodriguez-Fransen
Bea Rodriguez-Fransen is an Assistant Research Professor in Principled Innovation and Senior Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Her work explores decolonial pedagogy and futures thinking as practices of hope and freedom, and how educators and learners can collectively imagine and enact more just futures.
Finn Maling
Finn is a researcher and educator living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. He is a Research Associate in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia and at the Australian National University.
Workshop leaders
Building Hope in Education through Sketchy Thinking
Workshop leaders: Tammy Soanes-White and Donna-Lynn Baskin
This participatory workshop explores building hope in education through “Sketchy Thinking,” using visual and story-based approaches to support reflection, connection and learning.
Tammy Soanes-White is a northern researcher and academic whose work aims to improve equitable access to post-secondary education across Canada’s Northwest Territories through safe, meaningful and inclusive learning spaces. Donna-Lynn Baskin has been teaching for 20+ years at Aurora College in the Canadian Arctic, in the School of Developmental Studies at, providing secondary (high school) upgrading and college preparatory instruction to predominantly Indigenous (Inuit, Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, T’licho, and Dene) students.