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?
