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02 / THE UNLEARNING LIBRARY · OPEN READING ROOM

Unlearn the
water canon.

A reading room that begins with difficult questions, follows the scholarship, and returns to concrete struggles over water. No single thinker or region owns decolonial knowledge.

Explore concepts ↓Read our position ↗
The invitation

To read is
to disagree.

Power has its own vocabulary: security, development, efficiency, cooperation. The thinkers gathered here help us question those words. Choose an argument, follow it into a river history, and ask what it makes visible—and what it might still miss. Every entry links to the original work so you can read beyond our interpretation.

These are different intellectual traditions, not a single “Global South” voice. African, Asian, Indigenous, West Asian, Latin American and other writers sometimes agree and often disagree. That disagreement belongs in the archive.

17 critical pathways / Read, question, follow the evidence

Choose where
to begin.

Select a concept. Follow its primary reading, counterquestion and relevant documentary case. The links between concepts are invitations to think, not equivalences.

Explore an idea

What is missing from this canon?

Much of what universities call theory appears in English-language journals. Knowledge also lives in other languages, oral histories, collective practices, land-based teaching, religious and philosophical traditions, and arguments that never enter citation databases. What is absent here is a question about power, not a sign that those traditions have less to teach.

Apply a concept on the geographical counter-map ↗ · Visit the cultural counter-archive ↗