Border-crossing: History Dialogues between camp and campus
Our most recent post was by Gerawork Teferra, who studied global history in the Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya, in the framework of Princeton University’s Global History Lab. He met Marcia C. Schenck there, in 2016, when Marcia was a Princeton teaching assistant in the camp. Since then, they have continued their conversations and have collaborated several times together with other refugee and non-refugee authors, including Kate Reed, former teaching assistant on the History Dialogues Project. Here, Marcia and Kate introduce the project.
The History Dialogues Project grew out of Marcia’s conversations with Gera and his classmates back in 2016. Launched in 2019, it is now taught at 25 partner institutes through Princeton’s Global History Lab. The project started with a simple observation: a global history survey course, taught to refugee learners, had little to say about refugees. And it had nothing to say that was spoken by refugees themselves.
Refugees living in camps are often not perceived as historians for ‘historically explicable reasons’, to borrow Bonnie Smith’s phrase. They do not do the things historians do because they cannot: they cannot consult archives, they cannot access university libraries (or, often, libraries at all), they cannot depend on reliable internet and computer access, let alone the funding, research support, training, social networks, and material resources that underpin the research and writing of academic history. It is as though encamped refugee and historian have been defined as mutually exclusive identities. A person residing in a refugee camp cannot be a historian because a historian, quite simply, cannot be a person residing in a refugee camp.
What if we were to disrupt this tautology? To redefine what being a historian means? What perils do we run, what possibilities do we open? The History Dialogues Project is an overture, an invitation to conversation, about these questions. It is not a roadmap for a new practice of historical scholarship, and offers no sweeping vision for what history could be. It works in the interstices, at the edges, starting from existing practices and moving, haltingly and partially, to something new. It grows from WhatsApp messages, lagging video calls, and endless email exchanges. It has morphed into a nine-month course that teaches oral history and research methodology, and then guides students through their own research projects in close collaboration with their teaching assistants. It starts with the idea that anyone can be a historian—already a contentious proposition—and asks what happens next.
Gera’s scholarship is an example of how someone who has participated in the project, learning oral history research methodology and skills for conducting research projects, has used this training to engage with questions that are important to him. The question of where we go from here in our conversations between camp and campus is one that we are excited to discuss further. One further step we have made together with Gera and other co-authors is writing a forthcoming anthology at McGill-Queens University Press, in which we are reflecting together on the right to research: The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee & Global South Researchers.
Further reading
Mohamed Zakaria Abdalla, Richesse Ndiritiro, Shaema Omar, Kate Reed, Samson Rer, Marcia C. Schenck and Gerawork Teferra, ‘History Dialogues: Opportunities and Challenges of Oral History Research through Refugee Voices, Narratives, and Memories’, in Staci B. Martin and Deepra Dandekar (eds), Global South Scholars in the Western Academy: Harnessing Unique Experiences, Knowledges, and Positionality in the Third Space (London: Routledge, 2021).
Gerawork Teferra, ‘Fostering Education Services in Kakuma Refugee Camp’, in Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck, eds, The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee & Global South Researchers, under advance contract for the Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Series at McGill-Queen’s University Press.
For two reports on digital learning in situations of refuge and conflict, see Negin Dahya, ‘Education in Conflict and Crisis: How Can Technology Make a Difference? A Landscape Review’ (Bonn, Germany: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2016) [PDF] and Elizabeth Colucci et al., ‘Free Digital Learning Opportunities for Migrants and Refugees: An Analysis of Current Initiatives and Recommendations for Their Further Use’ (Sevilla, Spain: JRC Science for Policy Report, 2017) [PDF].
The header image shows History Dialogues project participants at the Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. Courtesy of Marcia C. Schenck.
