Using the Modules

Each learning module provides a recommended time frame, format, and structure, but they can also be adapted to suit individuals’ or groups’ needs. We have made these learning modules open-source to encourage you to modify, adapt, build on, and use these resources to support your own or others’ decolonial journeys, whatever your starting points or objectives may be. This is our way of refusing the proprietary, commoditized, and exclusive structures through which colonial knowledge often circulates in the world today.

Notes on Materials

While the modules are free and open to use, many of the materials are not. If a text or other material is paywall-protected, you have options! You can:

1. check if access is provided by your local public library or your home educational institution;

2. search online for the author’s personal or institutional website—often they’ll make the texts available for download;

3. contact a text’s publisher to see if they can provide a free copy (this often works best with book publishers rather than academic articles); or

4. contact living authors directly to ask if they can share a copy—9 times out of 10, they’ll both say yes and be delighted to hear you’re reading their work!

Even though the learning modules are designed to encourage decolonial thinking and doing, not all the texts (or other materials) are aligned with this goal. In fact, many of them are unabashedly colonial! For this reason, we encourage you to think about how the materials reveal new things about themselves in light of your subsequent learning, and vice versa. In addition to this, we encourage you to think about how the materials reveal more about the ways that colonization has shaped not only the worlds we live in today, but also our own viewpoints on those worlds.

Get In Touch!

Feel free to send a note to thank the contributors or let them know how you’ve used the modules, and please be sure to attribute the modules’ creators per the CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons licensing guidelines!

Creation of this resource has been supported by curricular innovation grants from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.