Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon, Ph.D., is an educator, facilitator, and author working at the intersection of peacebuilding, human agency, collective healing and conscious leadership in systemic transformation.
Her work integrates academic research, facilitation, and contemplative practices to help individuals, communities, and institutions navigate complexity and cultivate the inner capacities needed for sustainable change. Vivianna’s doctoral degree in Peace and Conflict Studies led her to research lived experiences in contexts of poverty and war, uncovering the societal and cultural layers of collective trauma embedded in human agency, empowerment, and language.
Intellectual depth • Embodied practices • Community engagement
My journey as a CNPq and APA Scholar awardee in Brazil and Australia deepened my commitment to understanding transformation and inspired me to continue training with international leaders. Early on, I was guided in the importance of policy and engagement with vulnerable communities, particularly women, by my late mentors Nilcéa Freire and Miriam Veras Baptista, who set me on my academic path (2004–2006). I researched truth commissions and transitional justice processes with the mentorship of Wendy Lambourne (2008–2014), studied human security, capabilities, and agency with Sabina Alkire (2011), deepened my understanding of trauma in the body through an intensive workshop with Bessel van der Kolk (2014), practiced awareness-based leadership tools through Otto Scharmer’s Theory U intensive workshops (2019–2023), learned systems thinking with Fritjof Capra (2021), and trained in collective trauma healing and meditation facilitation with Thomas Hübl (since 2020).
Yet, my most profound teachings have come from my roots — growing up between the Andean mountains and the jungle of Peru, accompanying rural communities, and engaging in deep contemplation of the human experience.
For over a decade, I taught at the University of Sydney, where I designed curricula and coordinated units of study such as Peace of Mind and Peace in the World (formerly Peace of Mind: The Psychology of Peace), weaving systems thinking and awareness-based practices into peace education. I taught and facilitated several courses within the Master of Peace and Conflict Studies program. During this time, I supervised postgraduate research on topics ranging from the Anthropocene to transitional justice and the role of awe in fostering peace. My international academic journey includes serving as a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative OPHI in 2011 and being a two-time Research Fellow at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute MLSRI at the Garrison Institute in New York, in 2016 and 2020.
My story
My experience has always been multi-diverse, flowing across many fields and contexts. It doesn’t fit neatly into the career trajectories that exist in most people’s minds. I am not a traditional academic—this was never a deliberate choice, but rather the result of a “red light” moment in my life, a pause to reinvent myself during my adaptation process to Australia.
A turning point in my pracademic development came when I was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s International Development Department during the Spring and Summer terms. At that time, I was exploring human agency as a way to rethink well-being in how we understand Human Development and Human Security. There, I encountered a concept that changed everything: the vital core.
What I had felt so deeply in the mountains of my home country suddenly had a name. The vital core described both the essence of human agency in development and an inner space—a space where one can step into freedom from the known. Outwardly, it helps identify threats to human agency. Inwardly, it opens a doorway to transformation.
This insight guided my work beyond scholarship. In my book, I introduced the consciousness-capabilities approach to explore how threats to one’s sense of Self can be understood and transformed. This approach offers a new way to see and nurture human agency, bringing the inner and outer worlds into dialogue.
Alongside my academic journey, my path in human development has been evolving for over two decades. From my early steps at the beginning of the new millennium as a youth advocate for human development and human rights, I sought to create spaces for awareness and action. I co-led and co-wrote the Make Poverty History newsletters as part of the Oxfam International Youth Partnership. I worked as a caseworker for Amnesty International, writing country reports and supporting asylum seekers. I also became involved in peace education through initiatives such as the School Peace Initiative and the Citizen for Humanity Project with the NSW Human Rights Education Committee in Sydney.
Two decades later, my journey continues on a global scale. I co-lead and co-host the Inner Development Goals Higher Education Circle, a worldwide community of over 1,100 academics and practitioners exploring how to expand inner capacities to meet the sustainability challenges of our time. Through all these experiences, my deepest commitment has remained constant: to expand awareness and deepen impact, so that individuals and communities can grow in consciousness and contribute to raising humanity’s collective awakening.
Vivianna Rodriguez Carreon 