Stories of spaceships, dolphins and colonial land relations

At the time of envisioning this Special Focus and curating the Call for Papers on March 18, 2025, news headlines in Canada reported that a pod of dolphins curiously gathered by a “strange object” that fell from the sky into their home in the Gulf of Mexico. This strange object was SpaceX Crew-9’s Dragon capsule, named Freedom, which splashed down off the coast of Florida after a months-long mission conducting vital science, technology demonstrations and maintenance aboard the International Space Station. The reports provided lengthy descriptions of the space mission’s gallant accomplishments, while providing gleeful remarks on the “cuteness” of the dolphins that had come to “welcome the astronauts back home.” To think about this astronaut∼dolphin encounter at face value, and from the dominant lens of human hubris, is to incite joy at the possibilities of this strange co-mingling between sophisticated machine technology and complex animal biology. What is at stake in the story of spaceships and dolphins, however, is the constraints imposed on dolphin agency in which these “cute” mammals become a passive backdrop for human drama. The gallant return of the Freedom capsule is a modern echo of historical maritime discoveries. Just as colonial explorers once viewed the ocean as a highway to navigate and conquer, and “newly discovered” lands as sites of extraction, mastery and objectification with its human and animal inhabitants seen as commodities, contemporary space exploration often exports these same extractive attitudes towards the Final Frontier (Atleo & Boron, Reference Atleo and Boron2022; Barua, Reference Barua2016). In short: colonial land relations.

At the core of colonial land relations is dispossession, landFootnote ¹ acquisition and access to land through a structure of (Eurocentric) domination and “interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it” (Liboiron, Reference Liboiron2021, 14). In other words, fixating on the premise that land is empty (terra nullius) or underutilised until it is encountered, mapped and commodified by western powers, colonial land relations promulgate the language of the coloniser wording the world and persists through the legal and economic structures of the settler state. To understand the dolphin∼astronaut encounter through colonial land relations is to recognise that land is not just soil; it is also the sea, the sky and multispecies kin relations therein. As colonial land relations work to sever the kinship between these elements, however, they are also predicated on dualistic and oppositional categories and subjectification resulting in a structure of hegemonic relations steeped in rigid definitions of identity (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014; Fanon, Reference Fanon, Longhofer and Winchester2016). That is, just as colonial land relations situate the (western) human as separate from the Earth, they also position dominant categories of the human in hierarchical positions of power.

Moving towards a decolonial present and future is to understand Land not just as a site of discovery but as a site of intergenerational accountability. This is what this Special Focus seeks to do, as contributing authors continue conversations that traverse social and ecological justice in environmental education. For instance, scholarship in the field that seeks to subvert stories of colonial land relations (see: Martuwarra et al., Reference Poelina, Wooltorton, Guimond and Sioui Durand2022; Nxumalo, Reference Nxumalo2016; Reference Nxumalo2019; Somerville, Reference Somerville2020; Wooltorton & White, Reference Wooltorton and White2024) and interrogates Cartesian zeal representing a sovereign subject (see: Gough & Adsit-Morris, Reference Gough and Adsit-Morris2020; McPhie, Reference Mcphie2025; Riley et al., Reference Riley, Jukes and Rautio2024; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone and Hacking2020).

Stories for social and ecological justice in environmental education

Social and ecological justice can mean different things for different peoples, communities and cultures. There are also different scales of accountability to pursuits of justice dependent on particular intersectional aspects inherent in one’s (micro) politics of location. As relevant to this Special Focus, social and ecological justice is understood as a staunch and explicit focus on subverting conditions that promote marginalisation and exclusionary processes of humans (Gewirtz, Reference Gewirtz1998) and more-than-human worlds (Bosselmann, Reference Bosselmann2016; Schlosberg, Reference Schlosberg2007); while rejecting claims of epistemological certainty regarding what, or specifically whose, knowledge counts as important. For instance, Frank Deer’s (Reference Deer2025, this special focus) exploration of Onkweh ón: we Perspectives on Story and Territory, centres the Journey of the Peacemaker as a paradigmatic structure for navigating life and Land through ancestral consciousness. Similarly, Shakir Muhammad Usman’s (Reference Usman2026, this special focus) research on Yazidi Stories works to deconstruct the epistemic and colonial violence in Mesopotamia to position Indigenous resilience as a defiant refusal of political and cultural erasure.

To understand the (often uncomfortable) implications of particular worldviews steeped in colonial land relations, this Special Focus turns to the power of storytelling as a method to speak to the heart of social consciousness and to reveal radical, moral and political phenomena underpinning social and ecological justice (Clough, Reference Clough2002). In these time of the Anthropocene∼NecroceneFootnote ² promulgating accelerating species extinction, ecosystem collapse, pollution, threats from peak oil and nuclear war, multiple military conflicts, Indigenous displacement and dispossession and the rapidly increasing refugee crisis, it is not intended that stories serve as a catharsis or cure for social and ecological injustices and threats; nor do the stories in these pages serve to enact forms of self-reflexivity that only work to legitimise preconceived notions and biases (Pillow, Reference Pillow2003). Rather, acknowledging that stories of the past are never undone, the collection of articles in this Special Focus reach into rich pasts in the threading of new and different stories in the thick present for still-possible futures (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016; Rosiek et al., Reference Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt2020). For instance, I, Kathryn Morog (Reference Morog2025, this special focus), embody this thick present by reframing Climate Anxiety as Anticolonial Activism, turning the emotional distress of climate change into a space of relational accountability and multispecies kinship.

Relating, knowing, thinking, sensing, worlding and telling stories with/through other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinking and yearnings, this Special Focus is an ethical and political project geared to challenge the status quo of social constructs and power relations, while also (at)tending to the birthing of new and different stories, assemblages and worldings (de Oliveira, Reference De Oliveira2021). To this end, authors pay critical attention to how power and territory are (re)configured within complex entanglements (Nelson & Drew, Reference Nelson and Drew2024), activating anti-oppressive and anticolonial stories of resistance and activism to grapple with the complex and intertwined notions of dis∼placement, home∼uprootedness, yearning∼longing and becoming∼belonging. This effort is taken up through the thought rituals of Lachlan Saunders, Scott Alterator, Scott Jukes and Stefan Schutt (Reference Saunders, Alterator, Jukes and Schutt2026, this special focus), where the reframing of human–crocodile relations shifts the perspective of the researcher towards a web of connections with Larrakia Country. This reconfiguration extends into the layered complexities of identity explored by Xiaoxiao Du (Reference Du2025, this special focus), whose narrative inquiry into Canadian higher education reveals how marginalisation and celebration coexist within pedagogical practices of becoming. This trajectory is also felt deeply in the work of Mehmet Yavuz et al. (Reference Yavuz, Woods and Premuda2026, this special focus) and colleagues, who investigate testimonial injustice in Bosnia and Herzegovina to show how LGBTQIA+ individuals navigate spatial (in)justice through everyday peace strategies that erode exclusionary nationalist values. Ripples of anti-oppressive and anticolonial stories of resistance and activism is further evident in Eleyan Sawafta’s (Reference Sawafta2026, this special focus) article, in which autobiographical vignettes of in-betweenness are used to navigate the exilic life between Palestine and North America. For Sawafta and others, Land is not property, but kin and teacher. Relational accountability is further emphasised by Sarah Ragoub, Peiki Loay and Lilian Pozzer (Reference Ragoub, Loay and Pozzer2026, this special focus), whose messy, layered accounts of science education in Canada trouble the singularity of western Science by foregrounding Indigenous sovereignties and spiritual geographies. Their work, alongside the contribution from Emily Frawley (Reference Frawley2026, this special focus) that explores literacy encounters with/in Country, seeks a pedagogical transformation rooted in becoming-with entangled relational worlds on, and with, Land, Country and Place as relevant to different geopolitical contexts.

As authors delve into political, ethical, ethno-ancestral, sociocultural, material and spiritual dimensions of what it means to belong in the face of (often uninvited and often catastrophic) social and ecological injustice(s) and change, this Special Focus connects forms of resisting erasure in living between worlds; what Anzaldúa (Reference Anzaldúa1987) described as the borderlands. It cuts across limiting and disciplining ideologies that insist on hierarchical and exploitive power relations between particular groups of people and between people and the Earth to hack paradigms of Whiteness as enmeshed within the violences of coloniality (Watego, Reference Watego2021). To this end, this Special Focus jives with dynamic and complex stories abounding Land, Place and race, shapeshifting across flickering edges to crack the foundation of coloniality through conversations rooted in interconnectivity and abounding in difference and distinction.