Refugee connections – autumn semester roundtable

Refugee connections – autumn semester roundtable

Refugee History
Announcements

We are delighted to announce the speakers for the ‘Doing refugee history’ autumn semester roundtable, focusing on refugee connections. Attendance is open to anyone, but registration is required. A sign-up link is included below.

Speakers at this session are:

  • Stephanie DeGooyer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
    The connection between early American refugee history and Native dispossession

  • Edidiong Ekefre (University of the Witwatersrand)
    Fleeing Boko Haram: historicizing the refugee connections in the Lake Chad basin, 2010-2020

  • Neela Hassan (University of Waterloo)
    A site of connection for refugees: forming community based on shared vulnerability and precariousness at an Afghan restaurant

  • Ryan Sun (University of British Columbia)
    The possibilities in transit: Jewish refugees onboard Shanghai-bound ships (1937-1940)

Collective poetry and refugee history

Collective poetry and refugee history

Katherine Mackinnon
Research methods

What can a poem, and the creative process of writing it, tell us about refugee history? Existing research on creative writing by refugees tends to focus either on the writing process or the writing itself. Research on the writing process is usually situated within the social sciences and examines the effect of this process on language acquisition, confidence building or wellbeing. Refugee literature is a field in itself, one that looks at the texts first and foremost, and even then mainly texts produced by published writers. Creative methods including collective poetry are a way of combining both of these approaches, allowing us to experience, document and analyse both the process and the output.

The unwilling nomads of twentieth-century Europe

The unwilling nomads of twentieth-century Europe

Bastiaan Willems and Michał Adam Palacz
Then & Now

In the first half of the twentieth century millions of Europeans were displaced by war, genocide, the redrawing of international borders, and mass flight from countries ruled by autocratic regimes. In order to address the need for a more integrated analysis of their experiences, our edited volume A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe. Unwilling Nomads in the Age of the Two World Wars looks at the collective experience of different refugee groups through the lens of a four-dimensional model of ‘host society’, ‘homeland’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘other diasporas’.

‘On the case’: methodological and ethical challenges of using casefiles as sources for refugee history

‘On the case’: methodological and ethical challenges of using casefiles as sources for refugee history

Antoine Burgard
Then & Now

Casefiles are a common source for scholars in social history and related fields. They have, for instance, been crucial in the development of micro-historical approaches to the Holocaust. In recent years, they have been taken into consideration to examine humanitarian responses to and experiences of forced displacement. In this post, I would like briefly to discuss some of the potential, limitations, and challenges that this material entails. To do so, I will examine a specific set of sources: the casefiles of a group of more than 1,000 young Holocaust survivors who were resettled to Canada in the aftermath of the Second World War through a project sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). These young people were predominantly Eastern European teenage boys who, at the time of application for a visa, lived in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, children’s homes and with foster families across Europe.

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

Jeff Crisp
Refugees Today

It is impossible to think about refugees, write about refugees, advocate on behalf of refugees or provide refugees with practical support without the use of statistics. And yet scholars and practitioners working on the refugee issue were surprisingly slow to examine the complexities associated with the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative data. As I pointed out in a paper published in 1999, “while all of the standard works on refugees are replete with numbers, few even begin to question the source or accuracy of those statistics.” The issue of refugee and displacement statistics is now taken a great deal more seriously than was the case two decades ago. Even so, the issue of displacement data remains problematic.

Refugee connections – call for papers

Refugee connections – call for papers

Refugee History
Announcements

We are pleased to announce that the ‘Doing Refugee History’ series will continue this year with two roundtables. The first will explore the subject of refugee connections and will take place on Thursday 20 October 2022, 2-4pm UK time.

As displaced people, refugees are often assumed to be disconnected—to have lost their connections to the places, people, and things that matter to them. Humanitarian programming in first countries of refuge, and refugee integration strategies in resettlement countries, aim to create new economic and social connections for refugees. But what connections have refugees, over time, made for themselves?

Time for a convention on internal displacement? The history of the internal displacement protection regime

Time for a convention on internal displacement? The history of the internal displacement protection regime

Bríd Ní Ghráinne
Then & Now

Relative to other forced migrants, refugees are in a privileged position in international law: they have legal status, rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and a specific organisation dedicated to their protection (UN High Commissioner for Refugees). Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs, have a much less developed protection framework, even though the global population of IDPs is 59.1 million. So what explains this difference of treatment between these two categories of forced migrants?

Waves of migration: a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in numerical modelling and oral history

Waves of migration: a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in numerical modelling and oral history

Joy Damousi, Filippo Nelli, Anh Nguyen Austen, Alessandro Toffoli & Mary Tomsic
Then & Now

The journeys of people who have been forced to leave their homes have, over centuries, included travel across water, including rivers, oceans, and seas. This post presents a new approach to researching refugee boat journeys by sea, based on a collaboration between historians and ocean engineers. We have used oral history research with survivors of a particular boat, rescued off Vietnam in June 1982, alongside numerical modelling so that the sea state the boat travelled through and the specific movement of the boat in those conditions could be determined. The scientific analysis explains how the ocean and weather, paradoxically, both created the conditions that were dangerous for this vessel, but also placed it in a position where it was rescued.

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

Neil J.W. Crawford
Then & Now

On 25 March 1997, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its first global policy relating to urban refugees. Though UNHCR had always worked in towns and cities since its establishment in 1950, the agency itself viewed this work as peripheral to its main mission. By the 1980s and 90s the organisation had become firmly associated with large rural camps on the borders of states. A landmark piece of global refugee policy, the UNHCR Comprehensive Policy on Urban Refugees put down on paper for the first time a single, though contextual, approach to working in urban areas. But the March 1997 policy came under immediate criticism, and lasted less than nine months.

Trickster narratives in the memoirs of Germans displaced from Eastern Europe, 1944-48

Trickster narratives in the memoirs of Germans displaced from Eastern Europe, 1944-48

Arddun Arwyn
Then & Now

Trickster narratives are particularly useful in exploring the complexities of refugee histories. Refugees are often marginalised and portrayed as either one-dimensional ‘innocent’ victims or as a threatening ‘other’. Analysing such narratives allows for more nuanced understandings of how refugees negotiate power relations and enact agency. Refugee trickster narratives communicate difficult and exceptional experiences through stories that are commonly recognised, thus highlighting their shared humanity and helping to break down stereotypes. Most interesting is the prevalence of the trickster narrative through time and across cultures, as it reveals a deep human impulse to tell stories of triumph in the face of physical and social marginalisation.

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