Refugees and displaced people rarely figure as historical actors, and
almost never as historical narrators. We often assume a person residing
in a refugee camp, lacking funding, training, social networks, and other
material resources that enable the research and writing of academic
history, cannot be a historian because a historian cannot be a person
residing in a refugee camp.The Right to Research disrupts this tautology
by featuring nine works by refugee and host-community researchers from
across Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Identifying the intrinsic
challenges of making space for diverse voices within a research
framework and infrastructure that is inherently unequal, this edited
volume 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. Chapters address topics such
as education in Kakuma Refugee Camp, the political power of hip-hop in
Rwanda, women migrants to Yemen, and the development of photojournalism
in Kurdistan. Exploring what it means to become a researcher, The Right
to Research understands historical scholarship as an ongoing
conversation - one in which we all have a right to participate.