The Right to Research: Excerpt

The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers 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.

The Right to Research is part of the McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Series, which advances in-depth examination of diverse forms, dimensions, and experiences of displacement, including in the context of conflict and violence, repression and persecution, and disasters and environmental change.

Below is the excerpted preface, which discusses the collaborative nature of this edited collection.

Preface: An Invitation by Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck

Dear Reader,

We are grateful and overjoyed to share this anthology with you. The essays collected here represent the culmination of years of research and writing, often under adverse conditions. It has been our pleasure and honour to work with these authors, first as instructors in a history research methods course, and now as editors and colleagues. The authors who have written for this volume are a global cohort, residing presently or previously in: France, Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Burundi. Their relationships to these nation-states are reflective of our globally fraught system of sociopolitical organization, including refugee-hood, official and unofficial migrant status, and varying degrees of citizenship. Their research, similarly, captures interstices, liminality, and marginality, and does so from perspectives rarely represented in historical scholarship. By way of introduction, we, as editors from Germany and the United States who do not share these perspectives or positionalities, want to introduce ourselves and share some of the ideas and commitments that guided us in compiling this anthology.

Throughout the teaching, editing, and collaboration process, our basic premise has been that historical research is a form of conversation. We have returned to this touchstone again and again. Whether conceived of as conversation with sources, historiographical conversation with other authors, conversation with colleagues and peers, or eventual conversation with the wider public, the notion of historical research as an intersubjective and dialogical process grounds this volume. It gives us great pleasure to invite you into the conversation we open here.

Dialogue can seem abstract, even utopian. However, thinking about research as a set of overlapping conversations means careful consideration of the positions – material, epistemological – from which each participant intervenes, as well as those factors that obstruct or preclude the participation of certain people in certain conversations. It means thinking about what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the “conditions of production” of historical scholarship and the ways these lead to silences/silencing. Trouillot identifies four moments when silencing might take place: in the creation of sources, in the creation of archives, in the creation of historical narratives, and in the compilation of historical narratives to create “history in the final instance.” The essays in this volume represent critical interventions along at least three of these axes of silencing. Whether they amount to a shift in “history in the final instance” will depend on how they are received by you, the reader.

First, because they are based on original oral historical research, these essays involved the creation of new sources that document experiences, perspectives, and phenomena that infrequently, if ever, surface in the documentary record. Second, without access to archives in the traditional sense, contributors to this volume built their own archives of interviews, ephemera, and observations, creating a counterpoint to the “archival logics” that govern state and agency archives. And third, as “non-traditional” historians by virtue of training, geography, citizenship, refugee or migrant status, or some combination thereof, the historians whose work appears here bring rarely heard authorial voices and perspectives to the process of narrative creation.

The conversational paradigm entails a commitment to transparency about the context in which, and process by which, these histories were created. This commitment, in turn, requires deviation from “traditional” historical scholarship, both to throw into relief the ligaments connecting author, sources, and narrative, and to draw readers more explicitly into the conversation. To this end, prefacing each essay, you will find a letter like this one, in which the authors introduce themselves and their work, making visible the intellectual and physical paths travelled to arrive at the narratives they share in their research. We ask that you keep an open mind and heart as you read these letters and the essays that accompany them.

In keeping with our commitment to transparency about the conditions of narrative creation, we conclude with a brief word about us, as the editors of this volume. Marcia, from Germany, is a professor of global history at the University of Potsdam where she teaches the Global History Dialogues course (which sparked the idea for this anthology) and researches the history of refugees across the African continent. She received her doctorate in history from Princeton University in 2017. In her free time, Marcia can be found painting, playing piano, and walking with her dog Ellie. Kate, from the United States, is a graduate student in economic and social history at the University of Oxford where she studies labour, land, and migration in Mexico and Central America. She completed her undergraduate degree in history at Princeton in 2019 and worked as a teaching assistant for Global History Dialogues for the first two years of the course. Not as artistic as Marcia, Kate spends her free hours baking, playing with her dogs Flynn and Annie, and spending time with her siblings.

It is perhaps obvious, but nonetheless important to state, that our status as German and US citizens, with abundant research and financial support from some of the most well-endowed universities in the world, both made this anthology possible and indelibly shaped it and the relationships between us and the contributors. Our citizenship affords us near freedom of movement, which was crucial for the development of this anthology. Both of us were able to teach in person in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya between 2016 and 2019. We not only established lasting relationships with some of the contributors to this book, but, in discussion with her students, Marcia developed the idea for the Global History Dialogues Project, where the journey toward this edited project began. In the formal introduction that follows this letter, we reflect more systematically about our role. For now, we would like to extend our gratitude to the authors, Aime Parfait, Alain, Gera, Ismail, Lazha, Phocas, Richesse, Sandrine, and Muna, for sharing their research here; and to you, for joining us in this conversation.

Sincerely,
Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck

Kate Reed is a graduate student in history at the University of Oxford.
Marcia C. Schenck is professor of global history at the University of Potsdam.