Alice Corble's slides for BLDS HEIF Workshop - 17 May 2023

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RETRACING THE “NEW MAP OF LEARNING”: (POST)COLONIAL LIBRARY AND ARCHIVAL LEGACIES
AND DECOLONIAL STRUGGLES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
AHRC-RLUK-funded research project by Dr Alice Corble (Sep 2022-Sep 2023)
Research questions:
• How important and integral is the library, as both a centre of learning and a repository of institutional
memory, to understanding contemporary calls to decolonise the university of Sussex?
• What new ‘maps of learning’ can be traced in exploring this question through Sussex library collections,
organisational developments, and lived experiences?

2. Sub-questions
• What were the (post)colonial foundations and pedagogical design of
the University of Sussex and how was the library formed and
developed in conjunction with these?
• What examples of both reproduction of, and resistance to, colonial or
racialised knowledge formations can be discovered across sixty years
of library development and staff/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
current calls to decolonise the university and fulfil Sussex’s pledge to
be an anti-racist organisation?
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3. Aims
• To make visible the role of the library in shaping Sussex’s particular
pedagogical and epistemic cultures that have developed in a postcolonial
context
• To centre the voices, identities, and learning, teaching and research needs of
marginalised Sussex students and staff
• To re-centre the importance of the library as an active agent of knowledge
exchange and a partner in social and cultural transformation
• To inform and improve relationships and collaborations between library staff,
faculty and students, with a focus on decolonial library teaching and research
• To make the case for further institutional and sectoral investment in
collaboration between library professionals and library users in necessary
action to fulfil decolonial and anti-racist objectives and actions.
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4. M E T H O D O L O G Y
Methods
• Archival research across Sussex
special collections, examining
provenance and usage and
surfacing institutional legacies,
hidden histories
• Interviews and workshops with
current and former Sussex staff
and students – stories and counter-
stories of library legacies and
usages
• Mapping collections and narratives
to trace (post)colonial, racialised,
and transnational learning
landscapes
Concepts
Tracing thematic tensions between:
• Reform and resistance
• Silence and noise
• Elite and marginal/vanguard
• Learning and unlearning
Following a cartographies of power and
knowledge (Alexander and Mohanty)
approach with critical race and decolonial
library and archival praxis (Leung and
López-McKnight; Griffin; Bastian et al.)
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5. T H R E E
S P E C I A L C O L L E C T I O N S
• University of Sussex Collection
(Institutional archive at The
Keep)
• University of Sussex Legacy
Collection (The Library)
• British Library of Development
Studies Legacy Collection (The
Library)

6. “[As] explorers with ample maps of other
universities but with none of our own, we
wanted to encourage [students] to find
relations between subjects where we did not
see them ourselves, and to dispute some of
our own conceptions. 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, 1964: 66)
“In the context of the Cold War, so-called
free countries had to mobilise all their
resources as effectively as their totalitarian
rivals in order to protect their way of life. It
was in this context that Asa’s bold intention
to, as he put it, ‘redraw the map of learning’
at Sussex made sense: it was designed not
simply to guide Britain’s path into the future
but to balance the redrawn map of
geopolitics.” (Cragoe, 2014: 226)
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7. 7
IDS Epistemic Origins
“…if action is not taken promptly, Britain will no longer hold its position as a centre
where there is available material for the study of development administration on a
world-wide scale. The India Office and the Colonial Office were in their times centres
of documentation in which was brought together material related to all the
administration of a great empire. […]. It would be advantageous to improve the links
with government publishers in Commonwealth countries ; and to extend them
systematically to countries such as those of Latin America, South East Asia, and
French-speaking Africa.”
‘Report of the Committee on Training in Public Administration for Overseas
Countries’. Department of Technical Co-operation, 1963. (University of Sussex
Collection)

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“The Working Party felt that the key to the success of the Institution would
probably lie to a very considerable extent in the availability of extensive library
material and the exploitation of these materials by new methods such as data
processing. It considered that a very close working relationship should be
established with the Colonial Office Library and with its ancillary libraries at the
Commonwealth Relations Office and the Ministry of Overseas Development. […] the
need to build up a highly efficient library service, adequately staffed with experienced
librarians and with adequate space for storage, etc., […]urged that the crucial
importance of this service should be stressed to the formation committee.”
‘Memorandum on possible procedure for developing and exploiting Afro-Asian library materials in the
University of Sussex.’ M.H. Rogers, Subject Librarian, 8 June 1965. (University of Sussex Collection,
The Keep)

9. M A P P I N G B L D S L E G A C Y T H R O U G H S P A C E & T I M E
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• New discovery tool integrated within main Library catalogue (thanks to Ben Jackson and Tim
Graves)
• Earliest record state papers from 1860 British Imperial Ceylon
• Exploring this tool will inform interview questions for former IDS Librarians and collection
users
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/test/blds_geo/htdocs/

10. C A L L F O R I N T E R V I E W
P A R T I C I P A N T S
• Interviews will be semi-structured conversations
about user/worker experience of BLDS legacy
collection and Sussex/IDS library spaces and
services more broadly
• Topics will explore how library
materials/spaces/services have shaped, helped or
hindered developments in participants’ learning and
academic or professional practice; considering post-
colonial dimensions of information behaviour and
knowledge formation
• Interviews can take place in person or via
Zoom/Teams throughout May and June 2023.
Interview data and transcripts will be kept
confidential and anonymised and methodology has
been approved by Sussex ethics committee.
• Contact Alice Corble on a.r.corble@sussex.ac.uk to
discuss and arrange
• Read more on Alice’s research blog and Twitter:
https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/decolonialmapsoflearning/
@decollibrary
Images of IDS Library (1998) from University of
Sussex Collection at the Keep