PLEASE NOTE THIS BOOK TALK HAS BEEN POSTPONED. A FUTURE DATE IS CURRENTLY BEING PLANNED. PLEASE STAY TUNED FOR MORE INFORMATION.

Book Talk | The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers

Marcia Schenck, Professor of Global History, Historical Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany

Kate Reed, Doctoral Candidate, University of Chicago

This workshop will be held virtually via Zoom. Registration is required to attend. 

About the Book

How historical scholarship can benefit from refugee voices as historians in their own right.

Refugees and displaced people rarely figure as historical actors, and almost never as historical narrators. We often assume a person residing in a refugee camp, lacking funding, training, social networks, and other material resources that enable the research and writing of academic history, cannot be a historian because a historian cannot be a person residing in a refugee camp.

The Right to Research disrupts this tautology by featuring nine works by refugee and host-community researchers from across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Identifying the intrinsic challenges of making space for diverse voices within a research framework and infrastructure that is inherently unequal, this edited volume offers a critical reflection on what history means, who narrates it, and what happens when those long excluded from authorship bring their knowledge and perspectives to bear. Chapters address topics such as education in Kakuma Refugee Camp, the political power of hip-hop in Rwanda, women migrants to Yemen, and the development of photojournalism in Kurdistan.

Exploring what it means to become a researcher, The Right to Research understands historical scholarship as an ongoing conversation - one in which we all have a right to participate.