Research as conversation: Thinking “the right to research” as a dialogue across displacement
In our first blog of the new academic year, we publish a conversation between Ismail Alkhateeb, Irem Karabağ, Marcia C. Schenck, and Kate Reed. Keep the conversation going by commenting below.
What would it mean to take seriously a right to research for those living in contexts of displacement, statelessness, and sub-citizenship? To consider refugees, asylum seekers, and forced migrants not only as subjects of historical inquiry, but as authors of historical scholarship? What kinds of history would result—and how would our understanding of history itself change?
These are some of the questions that we take up in a recent edited volume, The Right to Research, published in January 2023 as part of the forced migration studies series at McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book, which features works of original oral historical research by nine refugee and host-community researchers from across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, grapples with the challenges of thinking research as a conversation between scholars across stark structural inequalities.
One of our goals in the volume is to make visible what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the ‘conditions of production of history’—to reflect critically on the conditions that made our global collaboration possible, and also on the challenges and limitations inherent in any project that attempts to include those who have been systematically marginalized in existing scholarly conversations. To that end, we recently held a conversation between Irem Karabağ (project writer at the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network, LERRN), Ismail Alkhateeb (The Right to Research contributor), and Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck (The Right to Research editors) about the project, its intended audience, and the ways it has prompted us to rethink historical scholarship. The entire conversation is available as a podcast from LERRN. Below, we share some edited selections of the transcript of this conversation in the hope that our conversation can serve as an entryway for readers to join us in thinking about these questions.
Getting Started
Marcia C. Schenck: At the heart of the origin story of the anthology lies the Global History Dialogues Project, a course I developed in 2019 that teaches oral history research methodology and project design, implementation, and presentation to learners from across the world. Kate was a teaching assistant and programme manager on the course and Ismail was a student. To understand the idea for the project, we must go even farther back. In 2016, I first went to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. I was a teaching assistant at the time for a course taught by professor Jeremy Adelman at Princeton university, a straight up global history course called ‘History of the World 1300 to the present’. And we started talking about the absence of themes such as forced migration, but also the absence of voices of scholars with a displaced background in the production of what we were reading and learning. That got us thinking about designing a course that could specifically set out to address that silencing of voices by providing the training in a methodology that is accessible to everybody no matter where they’re placed, which is oral history; providing training in analysis of sources; and providing training also in storytelling and narration. Therefore, I wanted to offer the tools to actually focus on the students’ own research questions and do the research, develop the archives that they need to answer their question and then tell the story to the world, whether that’s during a student conference, or publishing it as a blog post. The contributors to this anthology have taken their research even further to develop it into a book contribution.
Refugees as Subjects and Narrators of History
Irem Karabağ: The book is an oral history research conducted by those who are closest to forced migration. Can I ask you how did you become interested in this field?
Ismail Alkhateeb: Sure. My interests come from beyond the academic framework, from working on, having firsthand experience with the Syrian crisis context and working with women. I have been always concerned that women who have struggled with socio-economic oppression would have their accounts overlooked. I belong to a small minority where a lot of accounts have been overlooked. So I was always concerned that a lot of accounts of individuals, of women, would be forgotten. And after all this comes to an end, the only story, the only narrative that would remain, is the historian’s—their version. So I have been trying to note down and document their stories. So this concern was manifested when I participated in the course, when we were asked to conduct case studies and what we think about certain changes. So I was thinking if I add the voices of those who were normally marginalized, that would diversify the understanding of the experience and give another meaning. It would enhance the understanding of people. And this is what we see in the context of displaced people. Often their sense of agency is missed. They are not being granted the platform to speak for themselves. Normally the narratives are being constructed by scholars, and their role in the story is being overlooked. I didn’t want that to happen, so I said, probably I can use this opportunity to see where I can go.
A Right to Research?
Irem Karabağ: The title is a nod to Arjun Appadurai’s essay on the right to research, and you kind of expand on that and you mention that citizenship should be taken out as a criterion to conduct research. So how do you think citizenship problematises how we conduct research?
Kate Reed: I think our approach complements and extends Appadurai’s conception of the right to research, by thinking not only about what the right to research does in the relationship between, in his case, a citizen and a state, but also in thinking about research as a conversation that involves others who are engaging in processes of research and inquiry. One of the things that we’re trying to think about with this book is what it takes to realise a right to research outside of a nation state/citizen context. On the one hand, that’s an epistemological challenge in taking individuals who, for various reasons, have not been understood to be historians because they don’t have access to archives or libraries, or they’re not inside the academy, or they’re not ‘scholars’ in some narrow and traditional sense of the world. And it’s also a real material challenge precisely because they don’t have access to archives or libraries or databases or all of the things that historians working within the academy take for granted as preconditions to be able to do historical research. So it was addressing those challenges, but also thinking, on the part of those of us who already consider ourselves to be ‘inside’ research as a conversation, what are the obligations incumbent upon us to take seriously knowledge that is produced from contexts of displacement? That is produced as oral histories in conversation with communities that have been displaced or that are in processes of displacement. Our provocation and extension of Appadurai’s argument is also thinking about that other side of the right to research—what does it mean to transform research in order to take all of the knowledge that’s produced in refugee camps, in contexts of displacement, by migrant researchers, seriously as part of ongoing conversations.
We hope that this set of excerpts from our conversation serves to spark continued discussion and reflection on research as a conversation across displacement, and look forward to continued dialogue on these and related issues in the future.
You can listen to the conversation in full here.
