Welcome to the archive and resources website for Decolonizing Minds: A People’s History of the World, a course offered by Brown University professors Naoko Shibusawa and Vazira Zamindar. This website is intended for alums, current and prospective students of the course, as well as anyone interested in history that defies the master narratives that we hear in the media and most classrooms.
Poke around our Project Archive and see what our students have been up to, or navigate to the menu in the top left and explore the site!
How to Use this Website
Start by exploring the categories and themes listed on the left sidebar. There are two main categories in this archive: archives of student work and resources. The “archives” category is pretty self-explanatory: clicking this category will bring you to all the student work we have archived so far. Note that this category has three sub-categories–video, website, and zine–which refer to the type of project archived. The “resources” category will take you to posts about interesting or helpful websites, usually recommended by our professors.
The themes are organized in a word cloud such that the most common themes appear in the biggest font. Clicking on a word or phrase in the theme word cloud will take you to an archive of posts that contain that theme, and can be either student work or resources.
For a complete archive of student work, navigate to the “Projects Archive” section by the header. This page is a list of all the projects we have archived, organized in reverse chronological order. Clicking on the links on this page will take you to blog posts about the projects.
For more resources, navigate to the “Resources” section in the header. Note that it has a drop-down list of three additional pages, suggested reading, syllabi, and videos. Simply clicking “resources” will bring you to the archive of blog posts labelled “resources.” Clicking “suggested reading” will bring you to a list of books and articles that may be of interest to you. The “syllabi” page is an archive of class syllabi. The “videos” page contains informational videos and documentaries created by professionals.
Note that not all of the student work on this website is from Decolonizing Minds; some work is from another of Professor Shibusawa’s courses, Stories to Live By: The Politics of Exceptionalist Narratives.