Building a Digital Decolonial Archive

Our research was to aid in developing an archive for a Women Studies and Gender Studies and Anthropology course on decolonization. We studied Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Anibal Quijano, and Enrique Dussel to first frame our research. Then, we visited the Field Museum, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the American Indian Center, and the Newberry Library in Chicago to see if these institutions are effectively decolonizing. With this project, we aimed to create an archive that would address how Eurocentric ideas ignore the history of the countries they exploited, recognize how colonizer nation hypocrisy is dangerous and creates the idea that the U.S. is the model for what the rest of the world should be, and to help us learn how to think through academic concepts in a non-western lens.