Date & time
Friday, November 14, 2025
12 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.
12 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.
Workshops & seminars, Meetings
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The audacity of contemplative resistance: Projecting possibilities and imagining new futures
Speaker(s)
David Robinson-Morris, PhD.
Cost
This event is free.
Organization
Contact
Where
Online
This workshop is part of the Contemplative Practices Summit series.
We live in a world and work within systems of competing demands and unrelenting pace that often leave little room to pause, reflect, or imagine. Yet in a time of global social unrest, systemic inequities, rampant injustice, campus upheavals, and ecological destruction, contemplative practices emerge as a radical form of resistance. These practices, understood as the ways we come home to ourselves, to one another, and to our ecological kin, root us in embodied presence while opening pathways toward transformation.
Education is never neutral; it can either replicate harm or nurture liberation. As educators and contemplative practitioners, we cannot simply dwell on what is broken. While tending to present realities, we must also engage our collective moral imagination to project new possibilities for futures that are whole, just, and life-affirming. Imagination, when joined with collective action, becomes a transformative mode of contemplative resistance.
For some, this resistance evolves into a liberatory pedagogy that makes freedom, equity, and justice more than intellectual exercises. They become embodied practices—ontological decisions—that allow us to breathe into the present moment while envisioning generative, just futures beyond inherited systems of domination.
In this session, Dr. Robinson-Morris will explore contemplative pedagogy and practices as methods of resistance that engenders liberation, cultivates collective care, encourages the praxis of justice, calls us to embody vigilant hope, and activates our ability to access the energetic audacity of our collective benevolent imagination.
Facilitator’s bio:
Dr. David W. Robinson-Morris is an author, scholar, and strategic advisor working at the intersection of imagination, equity, contemplative practice, and institutional transformation. He is the Founder & Chief Reimaginelutionary of The REImaginelution, a strategic social impact consultancy that helps organizations design liberatory futures through imaginative inquiry and values-driven strategy.
With nearly two decades of cross-sector leadership, his career spans higher education, healthcare, philanthropy, and nonprofit administration. He most recently served as the inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College and is the founding Executive Director of The Center for the Human Spirit and Radical Reimagining, a dream-think tank activating collective imagination to dismantle systemic inequity.
In service to advancing contemplative pedagogy and practices in higher education and society, Dr. Robinson-Morris led the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind), an international community of contemplative scholars and practitioners. Under his leadership, CMind deepened its mission to integrate racial, social, and environmental justice into contemplative education before sunsetting in 2022.
The author of Ubuntu and Buddhism in Higher Education (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Contemplative Practices and Acts of Resistance in Higher Education: Narratives Toward Wholeness (Routledge, 2025), his scholarship draws from the South African philosophy of Ubuntu, Eastern contemplative traditions, and the belief that imagination is humanity’s most powerful tool for transformation. A respected academic and thought leader, his work has appeared in Lion’s Roar, academic journals, and public forums across the country. He is a frequent lecturer and consultant across sectors, nationally and abroad.
This program is funded by Quebec's ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, through contributions from the Canada-Québec Agreement on Minority-Language Education and Second-Language Instruction.