Decolonisation and Anti-Racism

Library Search is a great place to start looking for resources on decolonisation and anti-racism. But first you need to think about how to use and combine your search terms and filters to get the most relevant results for your interests.

Take a look at our Search Skills Guide for lots of tips on how to effectively manage your search terms for the most relevant results. Some examples of how you might incorporate these search strategies for decolonial research:

• Truncation: the word decolonise has many grammatical variations and forms of spelling. Truncation commands are a quick and easy tool that enables Library Search (and most academic databases) to search for multiple variations of a word at once without you having to type them all out. It works by placing an asterisk after the root spelling of the word. So decoloni* will return results that feature all the following words: decolonise, decolonize, decolonising, decolonizing, decolonisation, decolonization, decolonial, decoloniality.
• Synonyms: think about alternative terms that will bring back further relevant results. For decolonial topics, these may include anti-racism, anti-racist, colonial, coloniality, colonialism, empire, eurocentric, eurocentrism, epistemacide, indigenous, indigeneity, imperial, racism, racist, etc. 
• Boolean connectors: once you have your list of terms, you need to think about how to connect them using Boolean connectors. Use AND to narrow or focus your results, OR to broaden your results, or NOT to exclude certain terms. 
• Filters: once you have a list of relevant-looking results, there may be a lot of them so this is when to start using the filters on the left hand side. Useful ones to start with are the 'item' and 'subject' filters. 

You can also check out our reading lists on Anti-Racism and Black History and Library collections as useful starting points. 

Former Sussex Vice Chancellor Asa Briggs in Falmer House Common Room, 1968. From the Mai 68 Collection.

The NUS Decolonisers Library is a collection of resources to support campaigners, new or experienced in the movement, with their own campaigns. Its main purpose is to provide you with more information on what decolonisation is and how they can get involved. This student-curated mixed media online library is compiled of resources from many different mediums (podcasts, books, videos, articles, etc) to help you explore, and expand your skills and knowledge around the decolonising movement.

The Library is a living resource and so will consistently be updated with new content. NUS also welcome activists to submit their own content, either that they have created or found elsewhere and would like to share with other decolonisers. Access the Mixed Media Library here. 

Global Social Theory

This site is intended as a free resource for students, teachers, academics, and others interested in social theory and wishing to understand it in global perspective. It emerges from a long-standing concern with the parochiality of standard perspectives on social theory and seeks to provide an introduction to a variety of theorists and theories from around the world. The particular impetus for the setting up of the site was the recent campaign organised by students in the UK asking ‘Why is my curriculum white?‘ This site is one attempt to build resources that will hopefully complement and broaden our shared conversations in this area.

The site is being developed and resourced collaboratively and will be added to on a regular basis. It hopes to draw upon the knowledge and expertise of all those who read it and so, please, do get in touch and offer an entry on a topic, thinker, or concept that you think should be included at the email address below.

The site is organised by Professor Gurminder K Bhambra (Sussex School of Global Studies) with web design and support by Pat Lockley. 

Discover Diverse Databases: knowledge from the global majority

This collection of databases includes resources we subscribe to as well as open access ones that cover literature and data from diverse global voices. Research has shown that dominant databases such as Scopus and Web of Science have a Global North and English language bias, so this collection is designed to encourage you to look for information from more marginalised sources to re-centre knowledge from the Global Majority. With thanks to Sally Dalton from University of Leeds Library for crowdsourcing many of recommendations in this collection. If you have suggestions of databases to include, please contact library.training@sussex.ac.uk