Through A Child’s Eyes: Reclaiming Space and Belonging in the Biodôme
by Neslihan Sriram-Uzundal (with Zayn Sriram)
Zayn’s eyes sparkle as he follows the striped bass gliding through the oversized aquarium. His mouth is wide open in silent awe, and his face is frozen in an expression of utter surprise.
Striped Bass in the Gulf of St. Lawrence
The Biodome, located in Montreal, features four distinct ecosystems, each a meticulous imitation that transcends spatial features such as temperature and seasons, which are held together by the atrium. The aquarium belongs to the Gulf of St. Lawrence exhibit, which, in addition to striped bass, is home to northern red anemones, common sea stars, black guillemots, and Atlantic sturgeon. Zayn loves fish and calls all of them “fishy.” Standing in front of the various aquariums, we describe their colors and shapes, but then we stop. We don’t know much more. We glance around, wondering if other parents can hear our painfully limited explanations. It is our first time visiting the Biodome, too, even though we have lived in Montreal for five years now. This all seems like a modern, futuristic zoo to us. We have been to zoos before, but this one is different because it sets a specific tone, an atmosphere of vastness, eternal space, and light, contrasting the heavy steel entrance door we pushed our stroller through.
As Gernot Böhme (2017) observes, space can function as “a political power and an economic factor” (p. 27). While we experience this space as somewhat intimidating, its design deliberate and commanding, Zayn has a very different reaction. He screams to be let out of the stroller, then bolts toward an elevator tucked into a seamless white wall, already absorbed in discovery. While Zayn instinctively engages with the space, running, exploring, and claiming it as his own, we find ourselves more preoccupied with how to behave and fit in. These kinds of spaces are unfamiliar to us. Hailing from Germany, we are more accustomed to being excluded from cultural offerings like museums, theaters, and cinemas. Spaces like this often felt inaccessible, unwelcoming, or not designed with us in mind.
I remember watching my partner apply again and again for jobs at various museums after completing his master’s degree in cultural theory. With each rejection, his sadness deepened. Eventually, we reached a point where we gave up. We had hoped to take part in theorizing space, as Anzaldúa (1990) calls for, but our hunger for belonging was not enough to shift the predominantly white discourse that shapes cultural institutions. Despite our efforts, we remained on the margins, uninvited to the conversation we longed to join. In the eyes of those exercising the power to include/exclude us, we had the wrong race, class, and – depending on the context – gender. In the German context, this exclusion from certain spaces was often legitimized through the language of Pierre Bourdieu. Within education, Bourdieu helped make the idea of social mobility appear more attainable: students from working-class backgrounds could, in theory, climb the social ladder through formal education, acquiring the cultural and social capital associated with the middle and upper classes. These forms of capital were framed as inherently valuable, implicitly setting the standards for inclusion and success (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). At the same time, these practices reinforced existing hierarchies, most visibly in the German school system. The so-called “PISA shock” in 2000 (PISA, short for Programme for International Student Assessment) triggered a wave of educational reforms after German students performed poorly in several key competencies. Yet the blame did not rest solely on the education system. Instead, attention quickly turned to students with a Migrationshintergrund (migration background), who were mainly from working-class families and were swiftly cast as the main reason for Germany’s disappointing performance.
After the PISA shock, Migrationshintergrund became increasingly used as a statistical category. Interestingly, Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology (capital, habitus, and so on) entered the mainstream German educational discourse around the same time. These concepts were often employed to explain students’ academic struggles with Migrationshintergrund, further entrenching class and cultural distinctions between them and their peers from middle- or upper-class German families. Mark Terkessidis (2004) argues that these results were used to construct an artificial correlation between minority identity and academic underperformance. The studies that promoted this correlation have had a lasting impact on the German school system. Despite claiming to operate under meritocratic principles, the system routinely fails to apply these principles to students with a Migrationshintergrund. Instead of being assessed based on individual performance, these students are often subject to systemic bias, reflected in how they are classified and placed. To this day, students with a Migrationshintergrund are disproportionately steered into Hauptschule or schools for students with special educational needs, educational tracks that do not offer a path to university. In effect, the system continues to deny access to higher education and social mobility to those already marginalized, legitimized by pseudoscientific correlations and entrenched institutional practices.
Zayn’s journey through the various ecosystems of the Biodome becomes an act of resistance, a joyful reclaiming of knowledge and space, and a rewriting of our lived experiences. His shifting expressions, ranging from surprise to excitement to pure happiness, mark small but profound moments on the path toward equality. In his movements, we glimpse a different relationship to these spaces: one not defined by exclusion, but by belonging. Tara J. Yosso (2005), reinterpreting Bourdieu’s theory of capital through a critical race theory lens, challenges hierarchical models by shifting the focus from a deficit-based view of minority students to one that highlights their strengths and cultural wealth. She introduces forms of capital that disconnect minorities from their socio-economic backgrounds: aspirational capital, linguistic capital, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, and resistance capital (Yosse, 2005, pp. 78-81).
The Gulf of St. Lawrence ecosystem has a warm temperature (the brochure says 18-24 degrees Celsius). Zayn runs around without his jacket, Jay pushes the stroller, trying to keep up, and I move alongside them, trying to keep Zayn from falling, until he slips on the small set of stairs beside the aquarium with the northern red anemones. Blood trickles from his mouth as I lift him up. He clings tightly to my chest and cries, “Mama. Fische. Hoch.”
He insists that he is not done with this experience in those few German words. I do not put him down. A moment later, he switches to English: “Mom. Fish. Up.” He wants to go upstairs to see more fish. His linguistic capacity, the seamless shift between languages, and the urgency with which he expresses his desire catch me off guard. At that moment, I no longer felt ashamed of our vague explanations about fish shapes and colors. He is speaking his world into being, which is more than enough.
The Penguins of the Subpolar Regions
We choose not to give in to our own lived experiences of exclusion – which might otherwise tempt us to head home after his small meltdown and the resulting eyes turned towards us. Instead, we allow ourselves to be drawn into exploring the space further, guided by Zayn’s energy. I read his enthusiasm as aspirational; it’s contagious as even his developing motor skills and potential falls do not impede his epistemic drive. We reach the end of the Gulf of St. Lawrence ecosystem and find ourselves in the atrium, the large white hall. Zayn leads us toward the subpolar regions. As we enter, the space transforms: ice walls rise around us, stark and crystalline, in sharp contrast to the soft fabric walls of the connecting atrium. I put on Zayn’s jacket as he squirms in my arms, trying to reach his stroller, a place of familiarity in this suddenly unfamiliar environment. I sense his anxiety and try to soothe it, navigating him through both the room and his emotions. I touch the ice walls, mimicking the joyful curiosity he radiated in the previous ecosystem just moments ago, hoping to rekindle that spark. After a while, he climbs out of the stroller and gently reaches for the wall. He moves back and forth, sliding between the icy surface and my reassuring arms, gradually finding his rhythm again. The hall with the ice walls extends until we reach the enclosure with the penguins. Eric Carle’s From Head to Toe (1997) features a penguin turning its head; we read this book every night as part of our bedtime routine. So when Zayn spots the penguins, he lights up and starts shouting, “From head to toe!” He points excitedly at the chinstrap penguins, northern rockhopper penguins, macaroni penguins, gentoo penguins, and the regal king penguins. I did not know the name of penguins until I entered elementary school.
My mother is functionally illiterate. My father worked in shifts. My siblings were always caught up in their struggles. When Jay and I had our son, we made a deliberate choice: we began visiting the library in our neighborhood, eventually joining the storytime sessions for babies and toddlers. The librarian who led the storytime often read books by Eric Carle, and we watched the joy in Zayn’s eyes as he listened. Slowly, we began to think of this space and the people in it as a kind of social community that could help fill the gaps left by our own childhoods. The library turned into a place where Zayn learned about the world, which helped us lose our anxiety in this ecosystem and prevent him from feeling it in the first place. At one point, I mistakenly called an Atlantic puffin a penguin. I only realized my error when I read the description on the glass dividing us from the world of fauna. But Zayn does not notice or care. He is completely captivated, standing in front of the puffins, mesmerized by their presence. He reaches out to them, pressing his small hands against the glass, not yet understanding the barrier it creates. He soon becomes bored by the subpolar regions and returns to the exit, landing in the atrium.
The Lynx of the Laurentian Maple Forest
Jay and I are reaching a point of exhaustion, but we push ourselves forward, holding onto the hope of catching a glimpse of the elusive lynx. The air shifts noticeably as we move from the icy cold of the subpolar regions into the more temperate climate of the Laurentian Maple Forest. According to the brochure, this ecosystem mimics seasonal temperatures, ranging from 17 to 24 degrees Celsius in summer and 4 to 9 degrees Celsius in winter.
We try to spark Zayn’s interest by telling him there’s a big cat, an animal from the feline family, in this habitat. We mimic cat sounds, hoping to engage him. However, he is more captivated by the forest itself: the light, the trees, the textures of the natural world. Despite our efforts and anticipation, we do not see any of the animals listed in the brochure: no northern raccoons, no North American beavers, no river otters, and no sign of the Canadian lynx. While Zayn is thrilled by this environment, we joke that this ecosystem resembles German forests, evoking the concept of Wanderlust – the joy of hiking, a notion often celebrated in Germany. Our families, too, embraced this idea, linking it back to their own childhoods, even though they come from very different parts of the world: Jay’s parents are from Sri Lanka, and mine are from Turkey. As we walk through this space, we are struck by how our familial knowledge and memories, shaped by migration, place, and adaptation, seem to merge with what is commonly understood as a German cultural concept. In this moment, the forest becomes not just an imitation of nature but a site where identities and inherited stories quietly converge. Through Zayn’s playful presence in the space, we slowly forget that we felt uncomfortable at the beginning of this trip. Upon leaving this ecosystem, Zayn meows tiredly and expects us to repeat the animal sounds, even though we missed the lynx.
The Blue-and-yellow macaw of the Tropical Rainforest
In the atrium, Zayn begins to cry. He is exhausted by the flood of expressions, the unfamiliar words, and the many worlds we have explored together. Still, we enter the final ecosystem. Time is pressing now; we know that we do not have much time left when he starts crying. Our gaze is entirely fixed on Zayn. The first animals we spot in the rainforest are the blue-and-yellow macaw and the scarlet macaw. Their piercing cries fill the air, and I find myself unexpectedly unsettled by their sharp, echoing voices. Zayn stands beneath them, making soft hushing sounds in an attempt to soothe them, or perhaps to quiet the chaos around him. When he realizes he has no control over them, he runs off toward the artificial waterfall. He reaches out, arms extended, trying to touch the diamond-like drops as they fall. I lift him up, and we stand there together for over ten minutes, just watching the water, letting it calm us both. Other visitors begin to pressure us, subtly but unmistakably, to move on, to leave this brief moment of stillness and re-enter the surrounding chaos. The piercing cries of monkeys echo through the space, jarring and insistent. Zayn is visibly upset, and we decide to retreat to the atrium. All three of us are experiencing sensory overload: Zayn, overwhelmed by the sheer novelty of the environment, and Jay and I, burdened by the constant task of keeping him both safe and happy. It is a quiet exhaustion that comes not just from noise and movement, but from the emotional labor of translating the world for a child while still trying to make sense of it ourselves. But this task goes beyond us. It is more than parenting; it is an act of ongoing resistance, intertwined with the intention to actively decolonize spaces like the Biodome. As Tuck and Yang (2012) powerfully remind us, decolonization is not a metaphor. It is not about inclusion alone or feeling more comfortable in these spaces. It demands a reckoning with the structures that continue to marginalize, extract, and erase.
Bibliography
Anzaldúa, G. (1990). Haciendo Caras/making face, making soul: creative and critical perspectives by women of color. Aunt Lute Press.
Böhme, G. (2017). The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (J.-P. Thibaud, Ed.). Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage.
Carle, E. (1997). From head to toe. Harper Festival.
Terkessidis, M. (2004). Die Banalität des Rassismus. Migranten zweiter Generation entwickeln eine neue Perspektive. Transcript Verlag.
Tuck, E., & Young, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity, and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006