Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Imperialism can feel far away until you notice that it runs through a family’s migration, a homeland someone cannot return to, the origin of the things in the room, and the wars a government fights in everyone’s name. Many people carry the history of empire in their own family stories. This lens starts there, and turns to the testimony of those who have lived colonialism, war, and displacement most directly.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- Where are your people from, and what did empire or migration do to that place and to them?
- Have you lived through war, occupation, sanctions, or displacement? What did it teach you?
- What do you know about the conditions of the people who made your clothes, your phone, your food?
- Have you been treated as a foreigner, an immigrant, or an outsider? By whom, and why?
- What did you learn in school about your country’s role in the world? What was left out?
- Who in your life carries a homeland they cannot return to?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room, and this theme’s room often holds migration and displacement directly. These materials extend that testimony. All are free unless marked otherwise.
Oral histories and testimonio
- The 1947 Partition Archive. A crowdsourced community archive of thousands of first-person oral histories of the Partition of India and Pakistan, plus displacement and refugee testimony. A vast record of decolonization’s human cost. Free: 1947partitionarchive.org
- Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) (AUB Libraries with Al-Jana and the Nakba Archive). More than 1,000 hours of digitized, indexed video testimonies from first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, browsable by place of origin, interviewee, and theme. Free under a Creative Commons license: libraries.aub.edu.lb
- Zochrot, Testimonies. A filterable collection of Nakba testimonies from displaced Palestinians and from Jewish fighters who took part in 1948, gathered by an Israeli organization working on Palestinian memory and return. Note its vantage point as an Israeli project documenting Palestinian testimony. Free: zochrot.org
Films
- The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, 121 min). The landmark reconstruction of the Algerian struggle against French colonial rule, shot in a documentary style with people who lived the events. A touchstone on anti-colonial resistance and counterinsurgency. Free with a library card on Kanopy, and free with ads on Tubi: justwatch.com
- Lumumba (Raoul Peck, 2000, 115 min). A dramatization of Patrice Lumumba’s rise as Congo’s first prime minister and his assassination, on decolonization and neocolonial intervention. Free with a library card on Kanopy or Hoopla: justwatch.com
- Concerning Violence (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2014, 89 min). Archival footage of 1960s and 1970s Global South liberation struggles set to text from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, narrated by Lauryn Hill. The best filmed companion to Fanon. Free via library on Hoopla and Kanopy: watch.plex.tv
Podcasts
- Empire (Anita Anand and William Dalrymple, 2022 to present). Two popular historians unpack colonial rule and revolution across the British, Mughal, and other empires through narrative storytelling. An accessible entry point on the lived texture of empire, more popular history than movement analysis. Free: empirepoduk.com
- The Red Nation Podcast (Nick Estes, Jen Marley, Melanie Yazzie, and others, 2019 to present). History and politics from an Indigenous, anti-imperialist perspective, connecting settler colonialism, land, and global empire. Free: therednation.libsyn.com
A note on method
This theme can put people in the room on very different sides of a living conflict, and the material on Palestine especially is contested and raw. The task is not to adjudicate, but to let testimony be heard and to insist that the people who have lived empire know something about it. Hold the room with care, and name your own vantage point rather than performing neutrality the school does not claim.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially migration and refugee testimony from Central America, the Sahel, and Southeast Asia.