Welcome to the Decolonial Maps of Learning research site, which showcases the research journey of an AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship (September 2022 – September 2023) designed and undertaken by Dr Alice Corble (Principal Investigator, University of Sussex Library). The full title of the project is Retracing the “new map of learning”: (post)colonial library and archival legacies and decolonial struggles in higher education.

Focusing on the university’s origin story in the context of post-war, post-imperial social change and the utopian mission to build a “new map of learning” in the 1960s, as well as the student radicalism on which Sussex’s reputation was built in subsequent decades of institutional reform and resistance, the project charts these epistemic and pedagogic landscapes and legacies through the Library’s institutional and cultural memory.

The overarching research question is how important and integral is the university library, as both a centre of open learning and a repository of institutional memory, to understanding contemporary calls to decolonise the university and its curricula?

See About page for more information on the research project design, and where the phrase “new map of learning” comes from.
To read about emerging findings from the project and follow Alice’s research journey, go to the Research Blog page.

Follow the project on Twitter @decollibrary