Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism

Abstract

One of the driving methodological and pedagogical concerns of the Common World Childhoods Research Collective, to which we belong, is the question of how to deal with the mess of the damaged worlds that we inherit and bequeath to future generations. The essays in this special section were commissioned in the wake of a Canadian SSHRC 'Connections' symposium organised by the Common World Childhoods Research Collective, and held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in late 2014. This interdisciplinary event brought environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars into conversation with early childhood education scholars and practitioners around the theme of: "Learning how to inherit colonised and ecologically challenged lifeworlds." 1 The authors of these three essays ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognisant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project. Nothing is finally settled. 2 Moreover, they start from the premise that the ecological legacies of the western colonial enterprise of early modernity closely articulate with the anthropogenic disturbances to the earth's geo-biosphere that we are 1 Details of this symposium can be found on the Common World Childhoods website, http://commonworlds.net/learning-how-to-inherit-colonized-and-ecologically-challenged-life-worlds/.