How do you decolonise a Reading List? One step at a time… 

A post by Maria Carnegie, Head of Customer Services, and Simon Speight, Head of Education, Learning and Engagement.

What we learn is inherently political. From what we are taught to how we are taught, certain values and voices are prioritised, and others marginalised. Decolonisation centres the impact of colonialism, both historic and ongoing, on how we understand the world in which we live and the information that we teach. 

Durham SU: Decolonise Durham Network Manifesto 

When did you last challenge your reading list? No, not to a duel! But by asking questions.  

‘Your reading list’ might be one that you’ve created, edited or use as a student. The core reading often remain broadly the same from one year to the next, although we may tweak them by adding new resources as we become aware of them or new research is published 

So, how often do we take a step back and look at the resources on our reading lists in a different way and challenge ourselves by asking

“How diverse are the resources in this reading list and are they accessible to every student?”  

Last academic year Library and Collections were delighted to employ a student intern, Yuka Atsuchi, to carry out a piece of work for us, with the ultimate goal of developing a toolkit to support decolonising reading lists.  

But what do we mean by ‘decolonising reading lists’ and why is it important? The aim is to ensure they are representative of our students and staff; that they include voices and ideas from around the globe and are not just rooted in western and North American publishing and perspectives. This supports our students to work and research in a global environment, to be open to ideas and approaches from all cultures and it ensures all our students find themselves represented in our reading lists. 

Yuka investigated good practice within the University and elsewhere, interviewing Durham academics and networking with other University decolonising interns. This helped to ensure that the toolkit built on existing good practice, whilst meeting the needs of our own communities. Such was her passion and enthusiasm that she completed the research stages of the project far quicker than we expected, so had time to create the toolkit as well.  

We’re not going to pretend this is an easy or quick piece of work. We’re reminded of the “how do you eat an elephant?” approach. Big things can seem daunting, and therefore we tend to put them off, as we can’t work out where to start. So, like eating an elephant (the answer is you do it one bite at a time), the toolkit breaks the process down into bite-sized chunks, taking one step at a time. 

Five Steps  

The toolkit is set out in five core steps.

Step one invites us to challenge our reading lists; in essence to evaluate and understand more about the background and origins of the sources we include in them. This can be done by reflecting on some key questions, or – with a little more effort – making use of a visualisation tool created by Manchester Metropolitan University that produces charts to show (for example) the percentage of items published in different geographical areas. This is a great example of building on existing best practice; whether from internal or external sources. 

Step two suggests some approaches to decolonising your reading list. It’s not just about adding a few new readings, although making a few simple changes can be a good starting point(?) – there are lots of aspects you can explore; with the intention of finding approaches that work for different subject disciplines. 

Step three underlines the importance of using different words to search for resources, for example using indigenous terms rather than western words. There’s a link to a glossary that will help you and lots of ideas on identifying new keywords to use when searching for resources. 

Step four introduces you to some new resources, databases, and formats for you to find new sources to include in reading lists. 

Step five invites us to reflect on the changes we’ve made and their potential impact.  

Not just for reading lists: The above strategy is not just for reading lists. You can also use them on your own bibliographies developed as part of an assignment to consider how representative your own work is. 

These are early days for the toolkit; we aim for it to grow and reflect our collective learning, challenges around decolonisation. It’s there for all staff and students to make use of. We want it to start conversations and help us have the ambition to try different approaches and resources in our reading lists. And we’d welcome your feedback on it. What did you find helpful? What’s missing? Do you have some resources or suggestions to add? 

Don’t be put off by the elephant; small changes do count. If you just reflect on one question in step one, try one new keyword or add one new resource that starts to make a difference.   

There’s lots of things we love about our job and one of them is the opportunity to speak to groups of academic colleagues and students about work that we’re doing. Thank you if you have hosted us already – we hope it has helped inspire you to start on a decolonising reading lists journey or helped you if you’ve already started that journey. If you’d like us to come and speak to your department, please contact either of us to set up a conversation.  

We would love to include some Durham case studies in the toolkit, so let us know if you have an initiative you think would be useful to share. 

We’ll finish with some words from Yuka, that you’ll find on the introduction page of the toolkit, reflecting on why it is important to decolonise our reading lists: 

“Reading lists are a key learning tool. They provide the basis of ideas discussed in a module and help students to construct their arguments and expand their thoughts. The resources also significantly impact both their immediate reading and how they might identify further reading. Therefore, a reading list should be inclusive and representative of the world to facilitate our students continued and wider reading and directly supports the University’s decolonising curriculum aims.”