The History of Forced Migration and Refugees (HFMR),  an international Working Group (WG) for archiving and documentation of history of forced migration was founded in 2015 with a seed funding from IASFM to serve as a focal point for research, dissemination, and practice for members interested in and working within the fields of forced migration and refugee-related research  and archives. We work on  methodologies for documentation, preservation, and researching the history of forced migration. 

Between the 26 to 30 July 2021, members of the HFMR Working Group will be contributing a number of sessions to the week long programme at the virtual Biannual Conference IASFM18  highlighting the range and scope of our work. Specifically the HFMR Working Group will deliver two workshops and two panels, and one exhibition co-organised with the Living Refugee Archive. Further information and updates on the work of the WG can be found on our website. Below is an overview of the sessions to which everyone is warmly welcome.

Monday, 26th July 2021: 2pm – 3.30pm Ghana Time

Ethics and Feminist Methodologies in Contexts of Border Struggles of Women and LGBTQI with Displacement Panel.

This session is led by the HFMR co-ordinator Dr Rumana Hashem. Three speakers from the Working Group, Nithya Rajan (University of Minnesota), Dr Veronica Saba (University of Trieste), and Dr Rumana Hashem (University of Nottingham) will present from their completed research projects with women and LGBTQI with displacement. The panel will be followed by a response by Dr Stavroula Tsirogianni (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzen).

In calling for a “feminist refugee epistemology” Espiritu and Duong ask “How do we approach the question of gendered displacement from the knowledge point of the forcibly displaced, which takes seriously the hidden and overt injuries but also the joy and survival practices that play out in the domain of the everyday?” (2018: 588). This roundtable emerges from such provocations of Critical Refugee Studies and of recent debates in feminist anthropology (Pinelli, 2019), to centre the voices, narratives, and experiences of refugees and migrants, and to not treat them as mere objects of analysis. In this panel the three feminist scholars go beyond the forcibly-displaced, and consider looking into ethics and feminist methodologies for working with both precarious and (voluntary) undocumented migrant-women and LGBTQI persons with displacement.

As early career researchers and feminist-sociologists who work predominantly with displaced women and non-binary people who are often cast as paradigmatic victim figures and whose narratives are marginalised both in scholarship and media representations, the question of ethical representation is central to Hashem, Rajan and Saba’s work. As well recognising the gendered inequalities in everyday journey of displaced women, the panel raises questions in regard to the ethics of ‘doing’ research with those women (and men) and the need for and challenges of using feminist methodologies for understanding gendered aspects of border struggles. Drawing from three individual studies with displaced women across the globe, this roundtable explores the important question of how to use their stories, narratives, and experiences ethically in scholarship and for the production of “good” knowledge.

How do we talk about gendered experiences such as labour, sexual and gender-based violence, motherhood and so on without reproducing epistemic violence and the stereotypes about women and LGBTQI individuals who have been displaced? While studying the lives of migrant women and displaced LGBTQI, how do we contextualize their narratives, in order to challenge the concepts of state, power and subjectivity? How can we complicate the use of ‘gender’ as an analytical framework in refugee studies, to produce research that challenges the assumptions and stereotypes about the everyday challenges, experiences, and resistances of refugees across the world? How can the work of “writing refugee and migrant lives” constitute a feminist praxis? Putting the work of scholars who worked with refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants into conversation with each other, the roundtable addresses the above questions and discusses whether the focus on gender and gendered experiences ranging from labour, resettlement, integration, education and gender-based violence have the potential to challenge these “global hierarchies of the displaced’.

Wednesday, 28^th July 2021: 12pm to 1.30pm Ghana Time.

Refugee Rights, Representation and Records: Archives as Sites of Contestation for Counter-Narratives of Anti-Racism, Social Justice and Empowered Collaboration.

This is a paper by the co-coordinator of the HFMR WG, Paul V. Dudman (University of East London), who will deliver this to a panel within the theme: Representation of “the refugee”. Paul’s paper raises some questions such as, how do we ensure that the rights of refugees and the narratives of anti-racism and social justice are represented within the Archive record? Should we be looking at establishing the counter-archive as a means of ensuring the lived experiences of refugees and the rights they are entitled too are adequately documented, preserved and accessible within the Refugee Archive?

This paper will take the notion of civic engagement, outreach and empowered collaboration as tools to empower displaced communities to right to determine how they are represented within the “Archive.” It will explore the concept of the archive as a contested space where preserving refugee rights in the records that we keep challenges existing discourses and notions of community memory, belonging and identity. It will explore how we have undertaken civic engagement and outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers in London and beyond to explore ways of documenting their stories using bottom-up oral history methodologies and the use of objectives and textiles as a means of preserving collective memories and new modes of representation beyond the traditional written word. It will also consider the role of ethics and the role of archives in documenting under-represented communities.

The role of the Living Refugee Archive will be considered as a means of providing a counter narrative of anti-racism discourse which has traditionally been overlooked in wider discussions on racism and the lived experiences of refugees and migrants. Whilst the history of racism is well documented, the history of the anti-racist struggle is much less well known, especially within the UK context, with the consequence that the lived experience of displaced people are often framed within the wider negative discourse associated with the `hostile environment.’

Tuesday, 27th July 2021 : 1.30pm to 2.30pm Ghana Time

Crafting Resistance: The Art of Chilean Political Prisoners Virtual Exhibition and Proyecto Documentando Chile del Archivo Viviendo como Refugiado de la UEL / Documenting Chile Project on the Living Refugee Archive.

This session has been co-designed with the Living Refugee Archive and displaced Chilean artists, which will be delivered by Paul V. Dudman (University of East London) to officially launch a new Virtual Exhibition on the Living Refugee Archive portal, entitled `Crafting Resistance: The Art of Chilean Political Prisoners.’ The exhibition is a collaboration with Gloria Miqueles and photographer Juan Cava, and it represents the shared cultural heritage of the Chilean diasporic community in London. 

The Crafting Resistance exhibition challenged the idea of political prisoners as ‘passive victims’ which fails to recognise the degree of agency many prisoners retain despite the horrific circumstances they endure. During the military dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990) hundreds of political prisoners were held in concentration camps throughout the country. In a number of these camps, prisoners organised themselves and crafted items from the very limited materials and improvised tools available to them. The exhibition brings together a collection of these artefacts and reflected on their importance in relation to sustaining the mental health and wellbeing of those incarcerated. These artefacts are now testimony to the mental endurance of all those who were political prisoners under the Pinochet regime.

This virtual exhibition launch will speak to the importance of these objects as cultural heritage and as symbols of activism and resistance in the face of human rights abuses for the Chilean community in exile and their role in documenting the material culture of a community. The session will also reflect on the current collaborative community-focused project working in collaboration with the Living Refugee Archive and the Refugee Council Archive at the University of East London, entitled: Proyecto Documentando Chile del Archivo Viviendo como Refugiado de la UEL / Documenting Chile Project on the Living Refugee Archive.

Thursday, 29th July 2021, 12pm to 1.30pm Ghana Time

Activism, Forced Migration and Archivism Workshop I

This is the first of a two-part workshop that draws upon lessons learned from one-on-one partnerships between activists and academics working in the field of forced-migration and history of the displaced. The proposal is to seek for alternative ways of archiving and preservation of the history of the displaced. This first part of a the workshops is organised by the HFMR bringing together five of our Working Group members with displacements to discuss anti-oppressive and decolonised methodologies, and the need for engaging with activism when we work on forced migration and with refugee narratives, and as/when we attempt to record and archive history of displacements.

A central question for any researcher and/or scholar in the field of refugee studies and history of forced-migration could be who writes and who archives whose history of forced migration. As history of forced-migration and narratives about refugees are often written and archived by people who are not forcibly displaced themselves and are established scholars based in the global North. This means that the knowledge produced by the historians and preserved in the existing archives are at least somewhat partial. Moreover, recorded history and the “displaced” narrative in the archive tends to often disengage or disapprove activism and community approaches as important for archiving, recording and dissemination. How can we contribute to disrupting this practice or towards a more representational archive and decolonised knowledge production?

In considering activism, indigenous Ghanaian, and displaced perspective from Malaysia and Kurdish migrants, this workshop focuses on decolonial knowledge production and researching history in the present, and working towards representational archiving, in particular by searching for means to connect global and local activists (in this case, displaced people in Ghana and Malaysia and the UK) with established archivists, historians, and scholars in the field of forced-migration. In line with part of general theme “disrupting existing paradigms” at IASFM18, we propose a session to engage in and discuss how to intervene in activities that can contribute to simplified or even violent (mis)representations of the ‘refugee’ or the internally-displaced.

The session is a collective effort of HFMR. Led by Drs Rumana Hashem and Mirjam Twigt, it was co-designed with three grassroots activists with experience of displacement e.g. Ghana based indigenous people who are victims of internal (forced) displacement. Due to pandemic and Covid-19 inequality, our indigenous Ghanaian activists could not make it to the conference, however, they have sent three blurbs and some of their thoughts about how and why we should consider activism as a decolonised methodology in the field. The WG co-ordinator, Rumana Hashem, will deliver these blurbs to the workshop and will share the ideas of indigenous Ghana based activists with us.

In addition, three other key members of the WG will present their research paper from an insider and displaced perspective. Speakers in this workshop include Dr Ayar Ata (London South Bank University), Naima Ismail (Director, Somali Women’s Association Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur), and Dr Mirjam Twigt (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oslo). Professor Giorgia Doná (University of East London) will do a response to the papers.

Thursday, 29th July 2021 : 2.30 pm to 4pm Ghana Time

Activism, Forced Migration and Archivism Workshop II

This is the second part of a two-part workshop hosted by the HFMR.  The focus of this workshop will be to consider how we can creatively respond to the central question for any researcher and/or scholar in the field of refugee studies and history of forced-migration could be who writes and who archives whose history of forced migration.

In line with part of general theme “disrupting existing paradigms” at IASFM18, the focus of this workshop will be on Disrupting the Archive, exploring how and why we should be looking towards disrupting traditional archival practices as a means to enable decolonisation within the archive space, thereby helping to facilitate collaborative community engagement and co-curation of archival collections in an attempt to ensure that narratives of displacement or documented ethically. Led by the archivist and WG co-coordinator, Paul V. Dudman, the workshop will discuss how we can ensure agency, co-production, and valuing the genuine voices of displacement and to encourage reflexive learning, thinking and discussion to help foster creative learning practices and processes.

The archivist will attempt to use lessons to be learnt from the first part of the session, and will help participants to reflect on and create an alternative way of archiving and preservation of the history of the displaced by focusing on decolonial knowledge production, researching history in the present, and working towards more representational archiving. We will draw on experience of working with communities and the undertaking of bottom-up community-based archiving projects situated within the context of the Refugee Council Archive and the Living Refugee Archive virtual portal as a means to connect global and local activists and displaced people, and the researchers in the field of forced-migration.

We will be live tweeting from the workshops using the hashtags #HFMR #IASFM18. Please follow us on Twitter for updates @ADHFM_WG; and watch the space and the hashtags #HFMR #IASFM18.

Full details of the #IASFM18 conference and programme can be found on the conference website at: http://iasfm.org/iasfm18/

It is still possible to reserve a place at the virtual conference, booking is still open via the #IASFM Eventbrite page at: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/iasfm18-disrupting-theory-unsettling-practice-tickets-145944194013