Welcome to the archive

Welcome to the Refugee Histories from the Margins online archive.
This is an educational site, produced by undergraduate students as part of their learning journey. For outside visitors the site offers pools of primary and scholar sources, and an insight as to how the task of an online archive on refugee histories has been approached by our students.

WHAT
The Refugee Histories archive is produced and updated every year by undergraduate students of the 2nd year module ‘Back from the Margins: Writing the Histories of the Excluded and the Forgotten‘, which is part of the Radical Histories pathway, offered by the Contemporary History BA at the University of Brighton. For the final week of the module students are asked to find information – especially primary sources – on a modern refugee history case study of their choice. Student groups present their findings in a workshop where we discuss both the contents and form of their contribution to the archive.
The project started in 2021 and every year a new cohort of students builds on the work of previous cohorts. It is a truly collaborative work across time.
Among our sources you will find: interviews and witness accounts, new articles, photographs and videos, documentaries, databases and scholar sources. Of course, this is a work in progress, innovative and incomplete, with no heavy editing from the tutors, so users need to treat it as such.

WHY
A common observation is that refugee voices are difficult to access, and refugees are constantly erased from the historical record.
The idea behind the archive is to introduce students to the methods, problems, and opportunities of using public media for radical history research. The archive is a reflection both of the opportunities and the limitations that trainee historians might face when researching marginalised histories.

Our aim is to gradually build, year by year, an archive of resources covering a wide range of refugee histories.
For feedback and enquiries contact Dr. Eugene Michail (e.michail@brighton.ac.uk)