In our first-ever podcast episode, LERRN host İrem Karabağ talks with book editors Professor Marcia C. Schenck and Kate Reed, and book contributor Ismail Alkhateeb of the anthology , published in 2023 with McGill-Queen’s University Press in their forced migration studies series.

While our guests reflect on how this thought-provoking book came to fruition, they also expand the meaning of “the right to research” and delve into the limits of traditional historical research. The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers invites its readers to a global conversation in the field of forced migration studies and historical research methodologies.

You can hear more about this influential anthology from its contributors and editors during the book launch hosted by LERRN on April 24th.

Ismail Alkhateeb is a Syrian translator and women’s rights activist. He helped coordinate the I Am She network, a network of community-based women’s groups or “peace circles” led by Syrian women working to reinforce effective political, economic, social, and cultural participation of women to realize peace, freedom, justice, representation, and transparency for all Syrians. 

Kate Reed is a PhD student in Latin American history at the University of Chicago. She holds an MPhil in economic and social history from the University of Oxford and an A.B. in history from Princeton University, where she began working for the Global History Lab in 2017. Before beginning graduate study, she was a teaching fellow for Global History Dialogues in its first two iterations. Her research considers questions of labour, gender, and structural economic change in twentieth-century Mexico, and her work has appeared in Public Books, Nacla Report on the Americas, and A Contracorriente. She is co-editor of The Right to Research.

Marcia C. Schenck is professor of global history at the University of Potsdam, Germany (). She holds a PhD in history from Princeton University, where she first became involved with the project that developed into this anthology. She created the Global History Dialogues course as part of the Global History Lab run by Jeremy Adelman at Princeton. Currently at the IAS Historische Kolleg in Munich, she is working on a book project about the Organization of African Unity’s refugee management during the decolonization era. Her research interests include global history, African history, oral history, migration history, and the history of international organizations. She has published in academic journals such as Africa Today, Africa, African Economic History, and Labor History, and her latest books are the open-access monograph Remembering Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and the co-edited anthology The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee & Global South Researchers (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023). She is also the founder of the Global History Dialogues Project, and the co-founder of the H-Net Refugees in African History network .

As with any paradigm shift, change in the international refugee regime comes with its ups and downs. The global pandemic, for example, proved that top-down and large-scale responses have become unsustainable and ineffective over time. Instead, Milner states “our only hope is to foster and to support localized responses.”

In the episode, Milner defines what localization means in the context of humanitarian responses, while unveiling some of the barriers and obstacles in implementing localization when meeting refugee needs. “We need to recognize that refugees are not there to be disciplined or governed, refugees are human beings with agency, ideas, and innovation. Recognizing that they have a meaningful and equal role to play is not just an ethically good thing to do, but also it’s a practically important thing to do” says Milner. Localization, then, requires a transfer of powers and funding from international actors to local actors who are closest to the forced displacement.

You can listen to James Milner’s previous podcast episode here and contact us on for a conversation!