37 Jessica Lussier and Claudia W. Ruitenberg doi: 10.47925/78.2.037 PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION | Susan Verducci Sandford, editor © 2022 Philosophy of Education Society Touch Points: Educative Experiences in Multispecies Contact Zones Jessica Lussier and Claudia W. Ruitenberg Te University of British Columbia “Tey touch; therefore they are. It’s about the action in contact zones.” 1 INTRODUCTION Microplastics and other anthropogenic waste has been found in all corners of the world, from the depths of the Mariana trench to remote moun- tain lakes. 2 It is just one illustration of the fact that there is no place on this planet that is not a contact zone, if we understand contact zones not only as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today,” but more broadly as ecological spaces where naturecultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, extractive industry, intensive agriculture, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. 3 For that is the frst move we propose in this paper: to expand the concept of “contact zone” beyond its human boundaries to include the meeting and clashing not only of cultural systems but also of ecosystems, and to understand their imbrication in what Donna Haraway calls “natureculture.” 4 In making this move, we follow Mary Louise Pratt’s approval of the extension of the concept of “contact zone” to include other-than-humans. 5 We heed her caution, however, not to turn the multispecies contact zone into a fat descriptor of benign entanglements, but to retain “the contact zone’s tie to the problem of human domination, capitalist modernity, and the ends of power. In this register, the imperial contact zone and the environmental contact zone