10983: “Awakening to Ourselves and the Earth” Within Management Education (CANCELLED)

Although people on all continents have been attempting to create a healthy world in which all beings flourish, we humans experience continuing waste, violence, and suffering. To what extent can management education make a difference in this situation? Some of us feel that people’s capacity to dream a new future is restricted by having our minds subtly colored by the ideology and nature of capitalism and industrialized society, which impacts our sense of what is ‘normal’ and to be expected in life. In what ways can we design learning so that the dominant paradigm can loosen its hold on our perceptions and thought? What alternative paradigms (more sustainable, fair, and healthy) can we develop, in part by drawing on Indigenous traditions? In this workshop we explore how awareness practices that value systemic change can be part of university management courses, entraining our minds and hearts so we can face these challenges and address them. We cannot analyze our way out of this polycrisis solely with our old ways of thinking and learning. Based on our special issue of the Humanistic Management Journal “Awakening to Ourselves, One Another, and the Earth: Awareness Practices and Systems Change,” this session gives us an opportunity to envisage together how to bring such perspectives into our teaching and learning (Goldman Schuyler et al., 2025). Themes we may touch on include: facing the polycrisis in ways that learn from varied Indigenous traditions, consciousness-centered stewardship, navigating the climate crisis, cultivating earth-shaped leaders, and transforming the underlying ontology of humanistic management so it includes the flourishing of all beings—all of which are addressed in this series of articles.