Tracing Transit (in)Tensions Between Settler Colonized ECE Contact Zones

Abstract

Tracing the curiosity of children, educators, and researchers at a childcare centre in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, we wonder how we might connect digitally across continents while thinking with place-specific encounters and tensions. In this article we share stories and unexpected (in)tensions that arise during a FaceTiming inquiry to invite questions that unsettle sedimented notions of who and what belongs inthe colonized places in which our settler educator practices take place. Provoked by Donna Haraway’s SF string figure method and situating our work within a common worlds framework, we seek new ways of connecting and transiting between our respective contact zones. In this article, we follow and pull at unsettling threads with the giving and receiving of two puppets, Bunjil and Waa, as they travel from their home in the Australian settler contact zone to the hands of those in the Canadian settler contact zone. These practices trace how these woven threads presence transit (in)tensions continue to stretch our thinking and modes of participating in our attempts at becoming accountable within the common worlds and our stories. How might this messy work make visible our accountabilities and inheritances in places of ongoing settler colonialism?