A right to research?
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| Author | Kate Reed,Marcia C. Schenck |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13145 |
International Migration. 2023;61:390–393. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
390
COMMENTARY
A right to research?
Kate Reed1 | Marcia C. Schenck2
1History, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
2History, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
Correspondence
Kate Reed, History, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Email: katereed@uchicago.edu
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13145
Received: 14 March 2023 Accepted: 22 March 2023
Gerawork Teferra, a colleague and collaborator of ours who lives in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, observed on
taking a course about global history that refugees were only marginally present as historical actors and that no refu-
gee scholars figured as authors of the course texts. The absence of (especially encamped) refugees as historians is an
extreme version of a by now well-documented phenomenon: that scholarship about the Global South, and in particu-
lar about Africa, is overwhelmingly produced by scholars in and from the Global North (Jeater, 2018; Mama, 2007).
As other social scientists, historians and Africanists have argued, this inequality in scholarly production is fed
by prior inequalities that are both material and epistemic (Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, 2018; Auma
et al., 2020; Biney, 2016; Landau, 2012; Martin & Dandekar, 2021; Monson, 2016; Vanyoro, 2019). Universities and
research centres in the United States and western Europe are far wealthier than their African counterparts and able
to finance ambitious international research agendas. Many excellent initiatives have attempted to channel some of
those funds to African scholars through workshops, training programmes and research partnerships, but the inherent
inequality of the funding structure persists (Schenck & Wetzel, 2022). Still, funding alone is only part of the story.
As Diana Jeater observes, the most important journals routinely reject the scholarship of African authors because it
does not conform to hegemonic, Global North understandings of ‘good’ knowledge production (Jeater, 2018). Exclu-
sion from these journals perpetuates inequalities in access to resources, as funding bodies prefer to support those
projects that will have high ‘impact’, as measured by publication in prestigious academic journals.
Exacerbating these inequalities and exclusions in the case of refugee and displaced historians are conditions of
often extreme material deprivation, lack of citizenship status and consequent confinement to refugee camps, and
limited access to institutions of higher education that could provide training, support and other resources to refugee
researchers. For refugee historians, the kind of international mobility, access to vast institutional repositories such as
libraries and archives, and engagement with a global network of colleagues and peers – the background conditions of
historical scholarship for Global North scholars – are typically unthinkable. What's more, as refugee studies scholars
have repeatedly shown, a hermeneutic of suspicion greets refugees, who are almost paradigmatically doubted as
bearers or producers of knowledge (Fassin & D'Halluin, 2005; Gatrell, 2013; Jensen, 2018). As we have written else-
where, ‘…refugees living in camps are [assumed] not [to be] 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 [libraries]…It is as though (encamped) refugee and historian have been defined as mutually
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2023 The Authors. International Migration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Organization for Migration.
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