Decolonial Maps of Learning is the short title of a AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship (August 2022 – August 2023) designed and undertaken by Dr Alice Corble (Principal Investigator, University of Sussex Library). The full title of the project is Re-tracing the “new map of learning”: (post)colonial library and archival legacies and decolonial struggles in higher education.

The project interrogates (post)colonial legacies of knowledge constructions, spaces and cultures produced via the Sussex library and archives. It explores historical and diasporic landscapes of learning using a cartographies of knowledge and power approach, in order to inform present calls to decolonise the university and understand the library’s integral role in this. Methods include archival research in the University of Sussex Collection, Library Legacy Collection, and the British Library of Development Studies Legacy Collection, as well as interviews with current and former staff and students. Exploring these untapped archives and lived library experiences reveals both reproduction of, and resistance to, colonial or racialised knowledge formations and disruptions across the university’s 60-year history. Sussex is a powerful site for this case study due to its postcolonial origins and status as the first of Britain’s “new universities” or “plate glass universities‘, founded in 1961.

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?

The University of Sussex was founded in 1961 and the Library building was opened by the Queen in 1964 (with its collections hitherto stored at Stanmer House and various sites on the university campus as it was constructed). Professor Asa Briggs described this moment as pioneering a bold “new map of learning” for faculty and students exploring unchartered pedagogical landscapes and crossing epistemic borders: “Given the huge changes which are taking place both in the formulation of new knowledge and in the world of action … we did not want to be confined to our own original territory even though the boundaries within it were being knocked down.” (Briggs, in Daiches, 1964, p.66).

A time of dramatic shifts in the geo-political world order led Sussex’s founding fathers to design progressive approaches to re-shaping education and research, putting the sciences into dialogue with the arts, and European Studies with African and Asian Studies. Sussex’s Brutalist campus designed by Sir Basil Spence was built against a backdrop of the ruins of World War II and the gradual dismembering of the British Empire, envisaging a ‘clean slate’ in the post-war, post-colonial era. This ‘new’ vision contrasted significantly with the imperial monuments and colonial legacies of traditional British redbrick universities. A closer exploration of the collections, stories, and knowledge architectures buried within the University of Sussex’s institutional memory, however, reveals a more complicated picture: riddled with hidden histories, uneven power relations, and tensions between resistance and reform.

In the present moment of dramatic shifts in educational and political world orders, in which there are mounting calls do decolonise education and embed racial justice, this project is designed to trace and expose the legacies of colonialism, racialisation and liberatory learning struggles hidden within the structures and cultures of the university through diverse and untapped bodies of knowledge stored and mediated through library and archival collections, services, and learning experiences of library users and workers.

Subsidiary research questions

• What were the (post)colonial foundations and pedagogical design of the University of Sussex and how was the library formed in conjunction with these?
• How have these origins and frameworks developed over the sixty years of the university’s life course in symbiosis with the development of its library?
• What examples of both reproduction of, and resistance to, colonial or racialised knowledge formations can be discovered across each of these six decades of library service design and user experience?
• What can this institutional memory and the role of the library tell us about where we are now and where we need to go with regards to the present injunction from students and scholar-activists to decolonise the university and fulfil its institutional pledge to become an anti-racist organisation? 

Research aims

• To reveal the hidden histories and knowledge infrastructures of how a university’s institutional and pedagogical culture and (post)colonial legacies are co-founded and co-produced through library and scholarly development.
• To centre the voices, identities, and learning, teaching and research needs of marginalised Sussex students and staff, thereby addressing institutional EDI priorities in closing racialised awarding gaps and improving inclusive educational experiences and outcomes.
• To re-centre the importance of the library as an active agent of knowledge exchange and a partner in social and cultural transformation: the nexus of the university and only department that connects and develops all disciplines and student and staff knowledge needs.
• To make the case for further institutional and sectoral investment in co-produced programmes of activity between library professionals and library users (educators, students, researchers) in necessary action to fulfil decolonial and anti-racist objectives and actions.

Research methods and timeline

Phase one (September – December 2022): archival research via the University of Sussex Collection, Library Legacy and British Library of Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy special collections.

Phase 2 (January – March 2023): interviews, focus groups and participatory workshops with past and present Sussex students and staff (using archival findings as forms of elicitation) documenting examples of lived experiences of both reproduction of and resistance to racialised and (post)colonial knowledge formations via library interfaces, collections, services, and working relationships.

Phase 3 (March – June 2023): data transcription, triangulation and analysis using intersectional qualitative and decolonial frameworks and grounded Critical Race Theory to draw out emergent themes and counter-stories about what and who the library is for, how it is shaped, and what role it has played in (de)colonial forms of learning, teaching, and knowledge-making.

Phase 4 (June – September 2023): Write-up and dissemination. Preparation for peer reviewed publications and internal/sectoral reports which recommend new ways of mapping the hidden infrastructures and cultures of knowledge-making and including racially oppressed and marginalised library users, staff and stakeholders in these processes.