Dean's Keynote: Associate Professor Shannon Leddy

You are invited to our next Dean's Keynote Series event on Thursday, 23th July 2026 from 9.00-10.00am AEST.

The Dean's Keynote Series theme for 2026 is: Dissecting Influence: Critical Insights into Education and Education Research.  

We welcome all to attend this most important event.

Abstract

In psychotherapy, intra-relational theory refers to one’s relationship within oneself, particularly in regard to processing trauma (Lamagna, 2021). Barad (2007) refers to intra-action as the interpersonal engagements within the world that produce our realities as they occur. Key to each of these intra- notions is the idea that we are of a oneness that positivist sensibilities have largely ignored for the past few centuries in defence to the import placed on breaking things down to their smallest constituent parts, which is itself often framed as the accomplishment of an individual.
In this paper, I propose that we adopt an intra-relational approach to educational research that moves us away from the separability and individualist tendencies that characterize positivist sensibilities, and towards a return to the understanding that we are all one, in this together (Donald, 2009).
Further, I propose that this approach engages a temporal element; namely, that of seven generation thinking, in which we understand our current reality as resting on the decisions of the seven generations preceding us. We must therefore conduct our present research and subsequent policy development with the understanding that what we see and learn and do now will impact our children and their children, and indeed, the more-than-human world as well, seven generations into the future.

Dr. Shannon Leddy is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia and an associate professor of art education at the University of British Columbia, whose practice focuses on using transformative pedagogies in decolonizing and Indigenizing teacher education. Before arriving at UBC, Shannon taught high school Art, Social Studies, and English.

She is the Co-Chair of the Institute for Environmental Learning, along with Dr. David Zandvliet, and her book, Teaching where you are: Weaving slow and Indigenous pedagogies, co-written with Dr. Lorrie Miller, is now available from the University of Toronto Press.