Refugees – what’s wrong with history? | #Peter_Gatrell
In this talk, Professor Gatrell throws down the gauntlet by challenging historians of the modern world to take refugees seriously. Why, when other ‘marginalised’ groups – women, the working class and slave populations for example – have become incorporated into the mainstream of historiography, have refugees been left in the cold? Perhaps it is because refugees are thought to be unorganised, inactive and inarticulate. Perhaps the neglect originates in the belief that refugees are transient players on the world stage, in the sense that ‘being refugee’ is assumed to be a dramatic but brief hiatus. These assumptions are problematic and questionable. But what might ‘refugee history’ look like? In picking up the gauntlet, Professor Gatrell’s answer is necessarily wide-ranging, taking account of histories of categorisation, political upheaval, humanitarianism and the often problematic relationship of refugees to their own past.
#réfugiés #asile #migration #histoire #catégorisation #humanitarisme