The conversation dives deep into the mechanics of memory, the ethics of handling trauma in storytelling, and the specific challenges of reconstructing history when official archives are sparse.

Inside the Episode

Max shares the origin story of Uncovering Roots, which began as a personal exploration of Armenian history and evolved into a global project. A significant portion of the discussion focuses on his series regarding Palestinians in Paraguay—a 1969 covert relocation plan that left many families stranded under false pretenses.

Key discussion points include:

• The Power of Oral Testimony: How to shape a narrative when official records are incomplete or intentionally obscured.

• The 1969 Relocation Plan: A look into the specific case of Palestinian migration to South America and the “false promises” of labor that drove it.

• Ethical Storytelling: Navigating the delicate balance between historical accountability and the sensitive nature of personal trauma.

• Archives as Tools for Justice: Why timing and accessibility matter when bringing these echoes of the past into current global contexts.

Key Topics

• Reconstructing the Past: The role of local newspapers and community memory in filling archival gaps.

• Community-Centered Narrative: The importance of elevating voices from within affected communities rather than observing from the outside.

• Storytelling & Accountability: How preserving history serves as a form of education and a check on power.

• Memory Reconstruction: The psychological and political significance of what a society chooses to remember—and what it forgets.

Resources and Links

• Uncovering Roots Podcast: uncoveringrootspod.com

• The Refugee Archive: therefugeearchive.org

About the Podcast

Across Archives is a production of The Refugee Archive, a research initiative dedicated to the lived experiences of displaced people worldwide. Alongside our companion series, The Archive Speaks, we explore how community storytelling can reshape history, amplify marginalized voices, and build global solidarity.

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Listen to Uncovering Roots

What exactly is Palestinians in Paraguay about?

Max Saakyan, creator of Uncovering Roots, gave a clear answer. The series, he explained, follows three central figures: researcher Hadeel Assali, historian John Tofik Karam, and Talal al-Dimassi, the only living person the team found who was willing to speak publicly about the scheme at the center of the story. That scheme, documented in connection with events beginning in 1969, involved plans to move Palestinians from Gaza to Paraguay, often under false promises of work and opportunity. In Max’s telling, the series investigates how that happened, how people were misled, what they encountered on arrival, and why this history remained out of view for so long.

That context matters because everything else in our conversation builds from there. Once you understand the scale of the story Max and his collaborators were trying to tell, the rest of the interview takes on a different weight. We were no longer talking only about podcasting. We were talking about what happens when history survives in fragments, when memory is carried by just a few people, and when the person telling the story realizes they now have a responsibility to handle it carefully.

Max’s project, Uncovering Roots, sits in that space between storytelling and historical recovery. He describes it less as a traditional conversational podcast and more as an audio documentary. That distinction matters. He is not simply hosting discussions. He is building narrative worlds from testimony, archival material, sound design, and careful editorial choices. According to the show’s official description, Uncovering Roots centers on lesser-known stories, particularly from Southwest Asia and North Africa, with a broader interest in overlooked histories.

In our conversation, Max traced the roots of that impulse back to his own life. He spoke about growing up wanting to hear Armenian stories in English, especially because language shaped what he could access. He had heard pieces from family, but not enough. Not in the depth he wanted. Not in the kind of form that makes someone feel fully seen. His first mini-series grew out of that feeling. He wanted to create something people could learn from, yes, but he also wanted to create something that people from those communities could hear and recognize as theirs.

That point stayed with me. So much of archival work, oral history, and documentary storytelling gets framed around preservation, public knowledge, or education. All of that matters. But there is another side to it that does not always get enough attention: the emotional fact of recognition. To hear a story from your region, your people, your language world, your historical experience, and to hear it handled with seriousness, can be its own kind of restitution.

Max is also honest about the fact that work like this is rarely truly solo, even when one name sits at the front. In discussing Uncovering Roots, he described collaboration not as a side note but as integral to how the work gets made. Sound design, co-production, interviews, research, translation, voice, and structure all shape the final piece. For the Palestinians in Paraguay series, he pointed to the importance of working alongside others, including Nadeen Shaker and Nada El-Kouny, while crediting Hadeel Assali in particular for helping bring the story forward. The official episode notes for the March 11, 2026 release credit Maxim Saakyan, Nadeen Shaker, and Nada El-Kouny as co-producers of the series.

What struck me most in this part of the discussion was how the story began. Not with a polished pitch deck. Not with a neat archive box delivered to the doorstep. It began, as many important stories do, with one person who had been carrying the history for years. In this case, that was Hadeel Assali, whose great-uncle had been sent to Paraguay and who had spent years researching the story. Max described an early interview with her that ran for hours. In the middle of it, there was even a small earthquake. It is the kind of detail that would sound too on-the-nose in fiction, but in documentary work those moments happen. They become part of the atmosphere of discovery. You can hear, in retrospect, the project taking shape in real time.

From there came the harder part: seeing whether the story could actually be built.

Max said this was one of the most difficult projects he has worked on, partly because of how limited the surviving sources were. The events in question took place decades ago. Many of the people directly involved had died. There were few living voices to speak with. Fewer still were willing to go on record. That scarcity matters. It is one thing to say a story has been overlooked. It is another to sit in the reality of what overlooked often means: not enough witnesses, not enough documents, not enough institutional interest when it might have made a difference.

And yet archives were there, if imperfectly. One of the key people in the process, Max explained, was historian John Tofik Karam. He became central not only because of his scholarly knowledge, but because he had access to materials that allowed the team to build the story more fully. Max mentioned testimonies from the Archives of Terror and a large collection of newspaper clippings. He also described waiting a full year for Karam to agree to an interview. That detail says a lot about the pace of serious work. Sometimes the story is not ready because one missing voice still matters that much.

It also says something about standards. One of the clearest moments in our conversation came when Max said, in essence, that he refuses to publish something that is only sixty percent there. That line landed with me because it names a pressure many people in media and storytelling feel but do not always admit. The urge to get something out quickly can be intense. But when the subject is politically charged, historically buried, and tied to real people whose lives were already mishandled once, publishing too early can become its own form of distortion. Listen to Uncovering Roots

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That is where the conversation shifted from research to ethics.

I told Max that once a story like this passes into your hands, there is a sense in which you become a steward of it. Something that was overlooked, buried, or pushed aside is now being documented again, and that creates a new responsibility. He agreed, but his answer pushed the point even further. For him, the challenge is not only what gets included. It is what gets left out.

That is where oral testimony becomes both powerful and difficult. Max does not approach interviews like a rapid-fire journalist collecting quotes. He approaches them more like an oral historian trying to reconnect memory. He described starting interviews not with the “main event,” but with everyday questions: what did you eat as a child, what did you enjoy, what small details still stay with you. Those questions are not filler. They are part of the method. They help people return to a world before the central rupture. They give memory somewhere to stand.

That resonated deeply with me because it is something we see at The Refugee Archive, too. Memory often does not arrive in a clean line. It comes in pieces. It comes after trust. It comes after repetition. It comes after the second, third, or sometimes the fifth conversation. People remember while speaking. They remember because speaking opens other rooms in the mind. A good interview is not an extraction. It is a process.

Max gave one striking example of that process when he said the interview with Talal lasted four days. Four days for a four-part series. And even then, much of it had to be left out.

That is the paradox of narrative work. The fuller the interview, the harder the edit. You may have hours of material, deep feeling, texture, contradiction, and detail, but the audience still needs a story they can follow. So the task becomes not only listening, but structuring. How do you take memory, which often moves by association and emotion, and shape it into a chronology that makes sense to someone hearing it for the first time? How do you preserve the person’s voice without flattening them into a simple character arc? Listen to Uncovering Roots

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That is not just a technical problem. It is also a moral one.

Max was clear that trauma has to shape the method. You cannot force memory. You cannot push because a line would be “good tape.” You cannot treat people as if the only thing that matters is the strongest clip or the cleanest scene. Sometimes the right thing to do is pause. Sometimes it is stop. Sometimes it is come back another day. That kind of restraint rarely gets celebrated in finished work because the audience does not see what was not taken. But in oral history and trauma-aware storytelling, what you choose not to push can matter as much as what you record.

Another important part of our conversation centered on why this series matters now.

For Max, this was not a historical story sealed off from the present. He spoke about the series as part of a longer pattern, one that becomes impossible to ignore when current events make the past feel freshly legible. During production, he said, reports out of South Africa made the team feel they were not just studying an old scheme. They were watching echoes of the same logic reappear in the present. That realization led them to revise the series and add an additional episode so the story would not sit in the past as if it had nothing to say about the world now.

Whether one is working in oral history, archives, journalism, or advocacy, that is a tension worth sitting with. There is often pressure to keep “history” in a safe box, as though the past is only interesting when it is no longer politically inconvenient. But many of the stories that most need telling are precisely the ones that refuse that separation. They keep pressing into the present. They keep asking whether the language changed but the logic did not.

We also spent time talking about voice and representation, which may have been the most thoughtful part of Max’s reflection on his own role. He said plainly that he is not Palestinian, and that because of that, it was essential to keep Palestinian voices central in the story. That meant not treating local voices as supporting texture while an outsider explains the “real” meaning to the audience. It meant building the series so that Hadeel Assali’s voice and Talal’s voice carried weight, authority, and emotional force.

This matters for more than symbolic reasons. Stories can be distorted without being technically false. Translation can flatten meaning. Editing can privilege what sounds legible to outsiders over what feels true to those who lived it. A Western frame can smooth out complexity while still sounding polished and informed. Max’s answer showed that he is aware of that trap and actively trying not to fall into it.

That concern comes through in how he thinks about the audience too. He said he wants Uncovering Roots to do two things at once. First, he wants people from the regions he covers to feel seen. Second, he wants listeners outside those regions to actually learn something. Not just consume a compelling story and move on, but sit with it, question it, and let it change the way they think. He even said that each story needs some larger question inside it. In this case, one of those questions is justice. What does justice look like in a story like this? Does it arrive through a courtroom? Through public memory? Through documentation? Through finally being heard? Or does it remain partial no matter what the archive recovers? Listen to Uncovering Roots

Those are not small questions. But they are the right ones.

We also talked briefly about what comes next for him. He laughed at the idea of stopping, because people who do this kind of work rarely stop in a real sense. They are always listening for the next thread. Always scanning for the story that has been ignored, loosely covered, or mentioned once in a corner of the internet by someone whose family carried a fragment no one else thought to preserve. He said that finding the story often takes the most time. I believe that. Research is not only about answers. Very often, it is about learning where the silence is, then figuring out whether that silence can still be entered.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked whether he is especially drawn to political stories. His answer was both personal and simple. He said that being Armenian means growing up with politics already close at hand, and that in many of the regions he covers, identity itself has been politicized. In other words, politics is not always a topic that one “chooses” to add. Sometimes it is already within the story because the lives at its center have been shaped by power from the beginning.

Still, the conversation did not end in abstraction. It ended with something practical, even intimate. Max’s final call was not “go start a podcast.” It was: archive your family.

Talk to them, he said. Put a recorder on the table. Ask what kinds of walks they used to take. Ask what kind of coffee they drank. Ask what stories their parents told them. Ask now, while you still can.

It was the perfect ending for Across the Archives because it brought the whole conversation back to first principles. Archive is not only a state institution, a formal repository, or a famous museum. Archive is also the cookbook passed down in a family. The story repeated at the table. The recording you almost did not make. The question you remembered to ask in time.

That is what made this conversation feel larger than one podcast episode. Yes, we talked about Uncovering Roots. Yes, we talked about Palestinians in Paraguay. But underneath that, we were really talking about the fragile route a story takes before it becomes part of the record at all. Who carries it. Who hears it. Who shapes it. Who waits for the missing piece. Who treats it with care. And what it means, finally, to understand that telling a buried story is never only about the past.

It is also about what kind of record we are making now. Listen to Uncovering Roots

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www.therefugeearchive.org

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Across Archives welcomes Noor Azizah, Co-Executive Director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network (RMCN), a refugee- and women-led civil society organization uniting twelve Rohingya genocide survivors across seven countries. Noor is among the most visible Rohingya advocates of her generation—a UNHCR Refugee Expert (2019 & 2023), NSW Young Woman of the Year 2024, and Finalist for NSW Young Australian of the Year 2025—but her leadership is rooted in something deeper than accolades: persistence, memory, and refusal.

Listen to the full episode here →

Building a Global Network of Rohingya Women

Noor’s story begins with connection. “We started as four Rohingya women,” she recalls, speaking of the early days of RMCN. “Our executive director, Yasmin Ullah, was in Canada doing advocacy, and I was doing the same in Sydney. Most of the community work was led by older men, and it was very lonely. I knew that wasn’t the life I wanted.”

From that small collective, RMCN has grown into a transnational movement spanning Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, and the United States, bound together by women who refuse to let the genocide define the limits of their voice.

“We wanted to show that Rohingya women are capable of leading the work,” Noor said. “Our youngest member is eighteen. Every time she speaks, I get goosebumps—I think, that was me. I wish I’d had that support system.”

From Matriarchy to Survival

When Noor speaks about Rohingya culture, she turns a mirror toward history. “Historically, we were a matriarchal society,” she explains. “Men used to come to women for advice. But since the violence began in 1942—84 years of massacres and displacement—everything changed.”

The transition from matriarchal to patriarchal norms, she notes, is not about religion but survival. “Now, women cover up as protection. It’s not just cultural; it’s fear,” she says. Inside the camps, gender-based violence is pervasive. Noor tells of a mother who holds her urine through the night rather than risk walking alone to the latrine, afraid for her life and her child’s safety.

“Even if she walks thirty seconds,” Noor says quietly, “her child could be kidnapped. And she could be raped.”

It’s a haunting example of how gender, violence, and displacement intersect—not as separate issues but as a single, continuous reality.

Hate Speech as a Weapon

Noor’s advocacy extends beyond camps and conferences into the digital sphere. RMCN’s “Hate Speech as a Weapon” documentary investigates how paid disinformation has fueled real-world violence across Southeast Asia. “We collected over five thousand screenshots of hate speech in Malay and Bahasa Indonesia,” she explains. “Politicians were using Rohingya persecution to gain votes.”

The film captures how anti-Rohingya sentiment has taken hold among populations that once saw themselves as Muslim allies. “We interviewed people on the streets,” Noor recounts. “One man told us, ‘They should not come. We don’t want them here.’ At the end, we revealed that we were Rohingya. He was shocked.”

That moment, she says, is the power of storytelling—to confront people with their own complicity and replace rumor with humanity.

The Cost of Silence

Throughout our conversation, Noor returns to a single, insistent idea: the danger of global silence. “The genocide has changed shape but not intention,” she says, describing how the Arakan Army now controls most of Rakhine State, continuing the Myanmar junta’s campaign to erase Rohingya life.

“The media doesn’t cover it. Maybe the Rohingya genocide isn’t a selling point,” Noor says. “When the world is quiet, the military continues to harm us. Nobody bats an eye.”

Her words cut through the noise of fleeting news cycles. Silence, in this context, is not absence—it’s complicity.

Storytelling as Resistance

When asked why she keeps telling her story, Noor doesn’t hesitate:

“Storytelling is important because not many people meet Rohingya people,” she says. “Only one percent live in freedom. We can’t do this work alone. We are done dying in silence.”

Her call is not for sympathy but solidarity. Every screening, repost, or classroom discussion becomes a small act of resistance—an insistence that the Rohingya story belongs in the public record of our time.

The Host’s Reflection

Listening to Noor, I was reminded that archives do not only store the past—they expose the present. Her clarity about power, gender, and safety challenges the idea of “voice” as a metaphor. For Rohingya women, voice is survival. It is the right to exist, unfiltered, in a world that has tried to erase them.

About Noor Azizah

Co-Executive Director, Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network
NSW Young Woman of the Year 2024 | Global Citizen 2024 | UNHCR Refugee Expert (2019 & 2023) | Finalist, NSW Young Australian of the Year 2025

🔗 Personal Site
🔗 LinkedIn Profile
🔗 Instagram
🔗 Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network
🔗 Women 4 Rohingya
🎥 Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime
🎥 Amnesty International
🎥 Global Citizen

Across Archives exists to create a collaborative space where archivists and storytellers working with people in displacement can compare notes, share lessons, and stay current on how narratives shape policy and programming. In this episode, I sat down with two leaders from Their Story Is Our Story (TSOS): Kristen Smith Dayley, Executive Director, and Brandi Kilmer, Community Programs Coordinator in Washington, DC, and co-founder of the Refugee Physicians Advocacy Coalition (RPA Coalition).

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We opened with origin stories. Kristen described how her work with refugees began in Seattle, where a large community of Special Immigrant Visa holders had resettled. She started by handling legal needs and soon found herself advising TSOS on related issues. In 2021, she stepped into the role of Executive Director. That pathway matters because it frames how she leads: with a lawyer’s attention to consent, privacy, and the downstream effects of publishing someone’s story in public.

Brandi came to this work through community programs and soon began focusing on one overlooked group: refugee and internationally trained physicians who arrive ready to serve but face long, expensive re-licensing paths. She helped launch the Refugee Physicians Advocacy Coalition, a growing partnership that mentors doctors, maps practical on-ramps into the health system, and advances policy changes that open more pathways back into medicine. In her day job at TSOS, she builds local relationships and lifts stories from the DC region that show both the grit and the barriers.

What we talked about

Why stories matter for systems change.
TSOS is known for its careful, first-person storytelling, which helps the public see the whole person, not just a statistic. Kristen and Brandi discussed how a single well-told account can unlock a meeting with a lawmaker, bring a hospital partner to the table, or shift the tone within a community. A page view isn’t the goal. Policy, practice, and budgets are.

Refugee physicians and the health-workforce gap.
We spent time on the practical side of shifting policy for internationally trained doctors. TSOS, working with students at Georgetown University School of Medicine, interviewed refugee physicians and distilled common barriers to re-entry. Those findings helped shape advocacy for legislation and new training models. It is simple to say “let qualified doctors practice,” but the details are where things move or stall: supervised practice options, provisional licensing, hospital sponsorship, childcare, transportation, and exam costs.

From testimony to text.
The coalition pairs personal narratives with policy drafting. A clinician’s story about repeated dead ends is paired with a clause that trims redundant steps. A parent’s description of overnight shifts is paired with a requirement for paid supervised roles. The aim is not just awareness. It is a paper trail that a committee can vote on, a hospital can implement, and a family can feel.

Ethics, consent, and privacy in an age of surveillance.
We also discussed the real risks that storytellers face. Agencies scrape social media. Bad-faith actors harass people online. A name in the wrong forum can put family members at risk. TSOS treats consent as a living process, not a one-time signature. That can mean anonymizing, withholding footage, or delaying publication until a case is safer. It is slower, but it respects the person who shared their life with you.

What keeps them going.
Both guests come back to the same moment: when a story leads to a real change. A doctor moves from gig work into a supervised clinical role. A lawmaker adds language that widens a pathway. A volunteer realizes they can do more than donate a winter coat. None of this happens without trust, careful editing, and a commitment to return agency to the narrator.

Episode highlights

• How Kristen’s Seattle beginnings led to TSOS leadership and a consent-first approach to storytelling.

• What Brandi’s team learns by walking alongside refugee physicians during the licensing maze, and why coalition work matters.

• Concrete barriers documented through interviews with Georgetown School of Medicine collaborators, and how those findings fed into legislative advocacy.

• Practical safeguards for anonymity, informed consent, and re-consent when conditions change.

• Ways local partners and volunteers can plug in: mentorship, exam support, employer introductions, and storytelling help.
  
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  About the guests

  Kristen Smith Dayley is the Executive Director of Their Story Is Our Story (TSOS) and a practicing attorney. She began working with refugees in Seattle in 2016 and joined TSOS in 2019, becoming Executive Director in 2021. Her work centers on ethical, consent-driven storytelling that opens doors for real-world change. TSOS profile: tsosrefugees.org/contributor/kristin-smith-dayley.

  
  Brandi Kilmer serves as Community Programs Coordinator (Washington, DC) at TSOS and is a co-founder of the Refugee Physicians Advocacy Coalition. She coordinates local partnerships, lifts stories from the DC region, and helps advance workforce pathways for internationally trained physicians. TSOS profile: tsosrefugees.org/contributor/brandi-kilmer. Coalition project page: tsosrefugees.org/projects/refugee-physicians-advocacy-coalition.
  
  

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Kristen and Brandi walk us through the real experiences of refugee and internationally trained doctors who arrive in the United States ready to care for patients but find themselves stuck in long and expensive pathways to re enter medicine. They share what they see on the ground every day and how TSOS uses careful storytelling to help communities and decision makers understand what these doctors are truly facing.

Kristen talks about how her background in law shapes the way she protects storytellers and how consent is never a one time thing. Brandi explains what she has learned from walking with doctors who are trying to get back into the workforce and why a coalition can move change faster than any single group working alone.

Key Topics

• How Kristen began working with refugees and why consent guides her leadership

• What Brandi sees when supporting refugee physicians through the licensing maze

• Why storytelling influences policy and community programs

• How real stories from doctors help shape practical solutions like supervised practice and provisional licensing

• What ethical storytelling looks like in a world where online safety and privacy matter

• How local partners in Washington DC support refugee and immigrant professionals

Resources and Links

TSOS website: https://tsosrefugees.org/
Refugee Physicians Advocacy Coalition project page
Georgetown University School of Medicine partnership

About Across Archives

Across Archives is produced by The Refugee Archive, a storytelling and research initiative highlighting how archives, oral histories, and community storytelling preserve the lived experiences of migrants, immigrants, internally displaced people (IDPs), and refugees worldwide.

Together with our companion series, The Archive Speaks, we explore how archives can amplify refugee voices, build solidarity, and reshape how the record of displacement is remembered.

🎧 Continue the journey on The Archive Speaks, featuring the real voices of displaced women and single mothers around the world.

Across Archives welcomes Dr. Benjamin Thomas White, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow, whose work bridges refugee studies, Middle Eastern history, and the evolving ethics of the archive itself. A historian by training, Ben’s research traces how archives remember—and sometimes erase—the voices of the displaced.

From Syria’s Colonial Past to the Modern Refugee Archive

Ben’s path into refugee research began in Syria, where his doctoral work examined the French Mandate period between the wars. During that time, he noticed something striking: in 1920s Syria, refugees made up as much as ten percent of the population, long before the modern refugee regime existed. Yet their stories were often absent from the records.

“The voices of refugees themselves were often excluded from the archives in really interesting ways,” he explains.

Working in colonial archives in both Syria and France, Ben observed that while the petitions and letters of Syrians under French rule were carefully preserved, the documents about displaced populations were almost always filtered through administrative voices. It’s a pattern he still sees echoed today, where refugees are recorded about, but rarely by themselves.

The Camp as a Global Historical Form

One of Ben’s most thought-provoking contributions in the episode is his historical framing of the refugee camp as an early global institution. Long before the Second World War, he notes, empires like Britain and Spain were already using camps to control civilian populations—from South Africa to Cuba.

But it was during World War I, in a vast camp near Baghdad, that Ben locates the birth of the modern refugee camp:

“For me, that’s where the modern refugee camp comes from—and it’s already global,” he says, describing how the camp drew resources from several continents, funded by British war budgets, American loans, Indian firewood, and local Middle Eastern networks.

It’s a story that reframes the camp not as a symbol of contemporary crisis, but as an enduring structure in the history of humanitarianism—built, funded, and rationalized on a world scale.

Refugees as a Structural Feature, Not a Problem

Perhaps the most resonant moment in the conversation is Ben’s challenge to how we frame displacement itself.

“Discussion of refugee issues often treats displaced populations as a kind of problem to be solved,” he argues. “But refugee history shows that refugees are a structural feature of the nation-state system.”

This insight shifts the moral and political question: instead of seeking to “solve” the refugee crisis, Ben suggests we interrogate the system that keeps producing displacement. In his view, the modern nation-state—since its emergence as the only legitimate political form in the twentieth century—creates refugees as a byproduct of its own logic.

RefugeeHistory.org and the Decolonization of Historical Space

Ben also shares the evolution of RefugeeHistory.org, a collaborative digital platform he co-edited from 2020 to 2024. Initially rooted in British and European perspectives, the site has since expanded to include scholars from the Global South and authors with lived experience of displacement.

He highlights the difficulty of diversifying editorial voices in a field still concentrated in the Global North, while also pointing to moments of real progress—like the publication of Charlotte Lysa’s essay on Saudi Arabia’s refugee history, which quickly became one of the site’s most-read pieces.

“It was the only available good piece of historical writing out there,” Ben notes, illustrating how public-access scholarship can fill gaping holes in academic literature.

For him, blogs like Refugee History serve not just as outreach, but as laboratories for thought: spaces where scholars can test ideas before expanding them into full-length research.

Reimagining the Global Archive

As I listened back to our conversation, what struck me most was Ben’s quiet insistence that the archive is never neutral. Every decision about what gets preserved—or who gets to speak—is political. His work calls us to think of archives not as static repositories, but as living records shaped by power, access, and survival.

It’s a reminder that for those of us documenting oral histories today, especially from displaced single mothers and female-headed households, the act of archiving is itself a form of justice.

(Listen to the full conversation here → [link placeholder])

About Dr. Benjamin Thomas White

Senior Lecturer in History, University of Glasgow
Research interests: Refugee history, humanitarian evacuations, colonial Middle East, animals and displacement

• RefugeeHistory.org

• University of Glasgow Profile

• Google Scholar

• Humanity Journal Author Page

• The New Humanitarian: “An Unprecedented Number of Refugees”

FULL PODCAST HERE
Here’s a simple way to introduce Dr. Rumana Hashem to our community: she studies the politics of displacement, but she also lives with the aftershocks of it. In our conversation for Across Archives, Rumana traces how the modern history of Bangladesh has shaped her research, why the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) still matter, and how immigration rules in the UK have ironically pushed her into the same maze of gatekeeping and limited access that many migrants navigate.

Rumana’s intellectual journey begins in the CHT, a hilly region in southeastern Bangladesh where dozens of Indigenous communities—Chakma, Marma, Tripura, and others—have long maintained distinct languages, land practices, and faith traditions. The story most outsiders know is “post-conflict”; the story Rumana tells is a longer arc of partition and assimilation. As she explains, when the British left South Asia and drew new borders, the CHT was placed with (then) Pakistan despite its largely non-Muslim Indigenous population—setting the stage for decades of state-led settlement, militarization, and violence that continued even after Bangladesh’s 1971 independence. For women in particular, the costs were gendered: sexual violence, everyday harassment, and the ongoing threat of impunity—harms that did not end with the 1997 Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord. As recently as October 19, 2024, activists were protesting outside the UK Parliament about assaults against Indigenous women in their own lands.

FULL PODCAST HERE
This is where Rumana’s research sits: at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, state power, and displacement—attentive to who is permitted to speak, and under what conditions. She traveled to Bangladesh to conduct fieldwork and was effectively kept under watch, escorted by the military for “security,” a constraint that would have chilled community trust and distorted any oral history. She refused to conduct interviews under those conditions, foreshadowing a theme that runs through all her work: ethical access matters. If the way we gather stories creates fear, the stories themselves will be shaped by that fear.

After moving to the UK to complete her PhD at the University of East London (UEL), Rumana’s attention shifted from the violence of the CHT to a different kind of violence, bureaucratic, but no less consequential. Even with Indefinite Leave to Remain, she learned that a rule change meant she still needed an additional permit to be paid for her work. It wasn’t that she couldn't teach or research; she wasn’t remunerated for it. The message landed hard: the status on your card can welcome you to the classroom, but quietly bar you from the payroll. She describes that moment as the point she began to “connect with people like me”—the irregular, the precarious, the in-between, recognizing how policy can “kill agency” by blocking both livelihood and voice.

This lived experience sharpened Rumana’s approach to archiving and participation. With colleagues at UEL’s Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging and the Refugee Council Archive, she helped drive a civic-engagement project with a pointed title: Democratic Access or Privileged Exclusion? The project asked the most basic questions about archives: What is an archive for? Who is it for? If the people whose lives generate the records cannot safely enter the building—or fear being seen doing so—then the archive risks becoming a vault for experts rather than a commons for communities. That is not a neutral design choice; it is an ethical failure.

If you care about the ethics of storytelling, if you’re wrestling with consent in oral history, or if you simply want to understand why the Chittagong Hill Tracts still matter for anyone studying displacement, you’ll want to hear this conversation. Rumana helps us connect dots across time and terrain: colonial partitions and modern militarization; gendered violence and “state assimilation”; the promise of academic projects and the policies that quietly undercut them; the aspiration of “democratic access” and the reality of who can walk through the door.

Listen to the full episode of Across Archives with Dr. Rumana Hashem LINK
We’ve included links to her projects and publications below. Please explore, share, and, if you’re able, support the work of making archives truly accessible to the people whose lives they document.

Guest Bio: Dr. Rumana Hashem

Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging (University of East London) • Programme Affairs & Innovation Officer, International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) • Co-Investigator, Democratic Access or Privileged Exclusion? / Living Refugee Archive • Coordinator, Working Group for the History of Forced Migration & Refugees (IASFM) • Guest Editor, Displaced Voices – A Journal of Migration, Archives and Cultural Heritage

Selected Links

• Living Refugee Archive: https://www.livingrefugeearchive.org/

• IASFM Working Group on History of Forced Migration & Refugees: https://iasfm.org

• Displaced Voices (journal): https://www.livingrefugeearchive.org/researchpublications/displaced_voices/

Recent Publications

Hashem, R. (2025). The Living Refugee Archive Project: Participatory Approaches to Archiving the Lived Experience of Migration. In T. Stefanac (Ed.), Archival Traces of Migration Handbook (pp. 309–328). Zagreb: ICARUS Hrvatska.

Hashem, R. (2023). Archiving Displacement and Identities: Recording Struggles of the Displaced Re/making Home in Britain. In Y. Shamma, S. Ilcan, V. Squire, & H. Underhill (Eds.), Migration, Culture and Identity – Making Home Away (pp. 55–78). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Twitter/X @DrRHashem

https://www.livingrefugeearchive.org/

Heather Oman did not arrive at TSOS through policy briefings or field deployments. She came as a writer, invited by a friend to help shape stories emerging during the Syrian refugee crisis in Germany. “I thought it would be a few hours a month,” she says. Years later, she is a steady hand behind TSOS story production, focused on sitting with people, hearing their lives in their own words, and letting those accounts guide what we do next.

Heather teaches us that early misunderstandings taught TSOS to over-communicate. Consent is a living process, not a one-time form. TSOS uses plain-language consent in the correct language, offers choices like aliases or no-face images (including profile, illustration-only, or object-only), confirms stories with the storyteller before anything goes live, keeps a standing path for edits, name changes, or takedowns later, and scrubs metadata when archiving. The internet remembers, so risk is minimized at the start, not after the fact.

Where the stories come from.

TSOS began in Germany with Syrian families, then widened. Teams have gathered first-person narratives in Greece, Cox’s Bazar, Ukraine, Switzerland, Jordan, and across the United States, including Kansas City and Bowling Green, Kentucky. You do not have to leave the U.S. to meet resettled communities whose stories are still unfolding.

Labels: how status shapes the day-to-day

Governments and UN agencies use specific legal categories. These aren’t just words; they decide what rights and services a person can access. The 1951 Refugee Convention was established after WWII to protect those escaping persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group membership. Only roughly three-quarters of all states are signatories. Western nations maintain a separation between immigration and refugee policies, which can lead to inadequate responses to the distinct needs of each group.

Community perceptions of refugees can significantly influence the effectiveness of policies, making it imperative for governments to address misperceptions that foster negative attitudes toward these populations. This is why storytelling is so important: it helps you better understand the value most refugees have and are willing to contribute.

Refugee. Someone outside their country with a well-founded fear of persecution (1951 Convention/1967 Protocol). This status carries defined protections and rights.

Asylum seeker. A person who has asked for international protection and is awaiting a decision. If recognized, they become a refugee under the law.

Migrant. An umbrella term used by IOM and the UN for people who move across borders for diverse reasons (work, study, family, safety). It is not a legal protection status.

Immigrant. Broadly, a person who moves to another country to reside there (many states reserve the term for permanent residence in their systems). It is not, by itself, a protection status.

Temporary protection (EU). An exceptional measure is activated in mass influxes (e.g., from Ukraine) that grants immediate residence and access to work, schooling, and services without waiting for individual asylum decisions.

U.S. Temporary Protected Status (TPS). A time-limited status for people already in the U.S. from designated countries facing conflict or disaster; it protects from removal and allows work authorization but is not a direct path to permanent residence.

Note on “parole.” In the U.S., immigration parole (often “humanitarian parole”) is a temporary permission to enter/remain; it is not a refugee/asylum status and does not count as formal “admission.” Because “parolee” also means someone released from prison in common usage, we avoid that term in public copy unless we’re explaining a specific U.S. program.

What these labels change

• Work and income. Some statuses allow immediate work authorization; others delay it, which can determine whether a family pays rent or relies on stop-gap aid. (Example: EU temporary protection includes access to the labor market; U.S. TPS holders can obtain employment authorization.)

• Schooling and health care. Enrollment rights, tuition categories, insurance eligibility, and public programs are status-dependent (EU temporary protection explicitly covers schooling and basic services).

• Housing and mobility. Access to public housing/benefits and permission to move between regions can hinge on status (varies by country; TP/TPS set clearer entitlements during crises).

• Safety and timelines. Some labels provide a more straightforward path to permanence; others are time-limited, creating cycles of renewal and uncertainty. (TP/TPS are temporary by design.)

• NGO eligibility. Many government-funded services can be offered only to people with specific statuses, thereby changing what local partners can legally provide. (This follows the entitlements tied to each status in national/EU frameworks.)

For storytellers and service providers, this is the tension: legal accuracy is essential — but a label is not a person. Status explains entitlements and barriers; it does not define identity or future.

What you’ll hear in this ~30-minute episode

• Afghanistan, 2021: Many accounts converge on the airport. One timeline, many truths: a river of mud, a single opened door, families rushing behind.

• Darfur: A father disguises his son to get him through a checkpoint targeting young men. The son resists. The disguise saves his life. Years later, he returns to the camp as an aid worker.

• Cox’s Bazar: Midwives-in-training and community health efforts push back against fragile care in the world’s largest refugee settlement. When “temporary” stretches into years, schools and clinics take root.

What Heather wants you to know

Storytelling softens us. It does not demand agreement, but it makes indifference harder. It is not “us versus them.” It is only us. Being a “refugee” is not an identity so much as something that happens to you. Anyone could be displaced. Everyone has a story.

• Listen to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/@TheArchiveSpeaks/featured

• Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/@TheArchiveSpeaks/featured
  

  The Refugee Archive: Global Center for Displaced FHH is a reader-supported publication.

  
  
  

Key Topics

• Heather’s journey from writer to Associate Director at TSOS

• The founding and growth of Their Story Is Our Story

• Storytelling trips to Germany, Greece, Bangladesh, Ukraine, and the U.S.

• How refugee stories build empathy and challenge stereotypes • Ethical storytelling and robust consent processes

• The impact of AI and digital security on refugee archives

• Trauma-informed interviewing and training initiatives

• Why storytelling changes hearts more effectively than statistics

• Building global connection through refugee narratives

Resources & Links

Their Story Is Our Story: https://tsosrefugees.org
Scholars Archive (BYU): https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu

🎧 At the end of every episode, we invite listeners to continue the journey on The Archive Speaks, our oral history audio archive featuring the real voices of women and mothers experiencing displacement.

When you sit “knee-to-knee” with someone, look them in the eye, and listen, fear gives way to recognition. That’s the core of how Their Story Is Our Story (TSOS) works, and it’s what Director of Archives Robin Peterson shared in our Across Archives conversation. You can watch/listen to the full interview here.

From a crisis moment to an archive with a pulse

TSOS began in 2016 in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, when images of families on European streets and shorelines filled the news cycle. According to UNHCR, that year capped a historic surge: more than one million people arrived in Europe by sea in 2015, largely fleeing Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Robin joined TSOS in 2019, helping shape a partnership with Brigham Young University that provides a permanent research home for interview transcripts and photos via the BYU ScholarsArchive. The archive launched in 2021, deliberately simple, more “card catalog” than splashy website, so researchers and communities can actually find and use the material.

From living rooms to Zoom rooms and back again

Before the pandemic, TSOS crews met people where they lived: kitchens in Seattle, front rooms in Kansas City, and refugee communities across Europe and Jordan. (Zaatari, Jordan’s largest Syrian refugee camp, still hosts roughly 75–80k people.) When COVID hit, interviews shifted online, less tea on the table, but wider reach.

Robin recalls a young Syrian man who lost his leg in the war and trekked toward Europe on a makeshift wooden limb before receiving a prosthetic in Paris. She remembers a Congolese mother whose resilience survived displacement, loss, and unimaginable grief. And she points to “Esther,” a long-time U.S. resident detained after a traffic stop, who became an advocate for detained women and a translator for other women while fighting for her own release.

These aren’t outliers; they’re the human side of the numbers we scroll past.

Why this work matters now

By late 2024 and into 2025, UNHCR estimates more than 122 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide—nearly double a decade ago—while humanitarian budgets strain to keep up. UNHCR

Headlines have shifted, too. After the 2021 fall of Kabul, about 76,000 Afghans entered the United States under Operation Allies Welcome, many still navigating status and family reunification. TSOS has followed those ripples into U.S. communities, listening to pilots, dentists, caregivers, and parents whose lives were split into “before” and “after.”

If you have two minutes

• Read one first-person account from the TSOS collection and tell a friend what you learned. Their Story is Our Story

• When you meet someone new, start with their name and a question that invites a story.

• If you work with sensitive stories, review an ethical storytelling checklist before you hit “publish.” HIAS

  The Refugee Archive: Global Center for Displaced FHH is a reader-supported publication.

Robin shares her journey from genealogist and historian to refugee advocate, and how she helped build the TSOS archive in partnership with Brigham Young University. Together, they discuss the power of sitting eye to eye with refugees, the ethics of consent in storytelling, and how to safely preserve personal narratives of displacement.

This conversation explores what it means to document humanity during times of crisis, how stories create empathy beyond headlines, and why data security and ethical storytelling are vital for refugee archives in the digital age.

Key Topics

• Robin’s path from genealogy and Holocaust studies to refugee storytelling
• The origins and mission of Their Story Is Our Story
• The process of collecting, editing, and archiving oral histories
• How storytelling humanizes conflict and builds empathy
• Shifting from global interview trips to digital storytelling during COVID-19
• Safeguarding personal stories and protecting vulnerable voices
• The resilience and generosity found within refugee communities
• Collaboration with Brigham Young University and the Scholars Archive
• The importance of ethical storytelling and consent in archival work

Resources & Links

Their Story Is Our Story: https://tsosrefugees.org
Scholars Archive (BYU): https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu

🎧 At the end of every episode, we invite listeners to continue the journey on The Archive Speaks, our oral history audio archive featuring the real voices of women and mothers experiencing displacement.

Each episode dives into the archivists behind oral history projects, archival collections, and community-driven initiatives that safeguard the stories of people on the move. The voices, artifacts, memories, and lived experiences that connect generations and build solidarity.

We believe that through this project, we can identify underrepresented perspectives, including the experiences of female-headed households and single mothers in displacement. By amplifying these stories, Across Archives seeks to bridge divides, challenge dominant narratives, and create a richer record of migration and resilience.

Join us as we uncover how archives can preserve human rights, inspire collective memory, and reshape the history of displacement for the future.

Episode Summary

In our first episode of Across Archives, we sit down with Paul Dudman, archivist at the University of East London and founder of the Living Refugee Archive. For over two decades, Paul has been at the forefront of documenting refugee and migrant experiences, beginning with the archives of the Refugee Council and expanding into oral history, community collaborations, and public engagement.

Paul shares the story of how the Living Refugee Archive was born, its focus on collecting lived experiences, and the importance of ethical and collaborative approaches in preserving refugee histories. We discuss standout projects, like the Chilean community archive, and reflect on the role of archives in safeguarding human rights, fostering solidarity, and reshaping narratives of displacement.

Key Topics

• Paul’s background and over 20 years at the University of East London

• The origins of the Living Refugee Archive (founded in 2015)

• Why East London’s diverse history makes it a fitting home for refugee archives

• Shifting from documenting policy to preserving lived refugee stories

• Oral history projects with Syrian, Ugandan Asian, Chilean, and other communities

• The Chilean craftwork exhibition and its lasting impact

• Balancing ethics, consent, and accessibility in refugee storytelling

• Collaboration with archivists, scholars, and international organizations

• The future of the Living Refugee Archive, including upcoming journals and projects

Resources & Links

• Living Refugee Archive

• Twitter/X: @LivingRefArch

When archivist Paul V. Dudman talks about the Living Refugee Archive (LRA), he doesn’t start with boxes or servers. He starts with a map. The University of East London sits in Newham, one of the UK’s most diverse boroughs and a historic first stop for newcomers. Geography shapes who walks in, what gets saved, and how materials are used by neighbors and students alike. For centuries the East has drawn people in—ports, work, affordable rooms, communities willing to make space for one more family. The first sites of arrival generate the earliest traces: union cards, shop receipts, church lists, letters home, school forms, photos from first festivals, neighborhood WhatsApp recordings. They’re fragile. Without a place-attentive practice, they vanish.

In arrival neighborhoods, risk isn’t abstract. LRA often releases transcripts while withholding audio when recognition could endanger participants; they also build ongoing consent so people can change their minds later. Ethics isn’t a paragraph at the end; it’s a design constraint at the start. The same stance guides Dudman’s human-rights work: the job isn’t only to keep, but to keep safely and share what works across institutions.

Linking lives: voice → object → document

LRA’s method is deliberately open: pair oral histories with artifacts and paper trails so the whole is more truthful than any single piece. Workshops, quilting, craft, and exhibition prep become conduits for one story that prompts another, then another. Scattered traces become a linked record a community recognizes as its own.

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Why Chile belongs here

A collaboration with the Chilean community began with a chance email and evolved into an exhibition of ~150 handcrafted items made by political prisoners in 1970s Chile, followed by screenings, workshops, and intergenerational memory work. The point isn’t to equate contexts; it’s to see a common logic: when power tries to erase, people make records anyway. A carved keepsake in a Chilean cell and a mother’s clinic card in Cox’s Bazar do similar work. Both anchor memory to something graspable. Both ask stewards to protect the living while preserving the truth.

For The Refugee Archive (TRA), the takeaway is practical: start with place. Our mandate is precise—to support single-mother and female-headed households (FHH) in displacement, and a place-first approach is how that mandate gains traction. We’re beginning with Arrival Hubs, sites where FHH stories cluster and where daily life leaves a paper and digital trail. From Paul’s work in East London’s Newham to our work in Cox’s Bazar (Bangladesh), Amman and the north (Jordan), Cairo (Egypt), and Goma (DRC), place sets the paper trail, the risks, and the routes of memory. Different geographies produce different kinds of records, which in turn determine what can be safely made public. Our job is to link voice → object → document across these places so FHH stories are durable and discoverable without making participants less safe.

Listen, share, and get involved.

Please share one episode from the podcast The Archive Speaks with people who care about education, care economies, or women’s leadership in displacement. That’s how this work travels. Contact us if you’d like to partner or contribute to the movement.

In my final thoughts, while reflecting on the complexities of our digital age, I find myself contemplating how emotional labor affects those involved in storytelling. This fatigue is about the emotional burden carried through countless narratives, often linked to issues of cultural humility, which involves respecting and understanding different cultural perspectives and recognizing my own cultural biases. As I explore these themes while talking to the experts in the field, I also consider broader questions of digital equity and archival justice, exploring how access to digital resources is distributed across different communities and ensuring that marginalized groups are not excluded from essential information and archival materials.

Thinking about these issues involves examining the social, ethical, and technological factors that influence digital inclusion and equity, and working towards creating a more just and accessible digital archival landscape, and about how access and representation influence our collective memory. I also firmly recognize the need to adapt archival structures. This awareness raises the need to adapt archival structures, evolving them thoughtfully without creating a rigid framework, such as making room for flexibility while upholding ethical standards in gathering these stories.

Furthermore, this practice also requires a balance. Therefore, ensuring informed consent of the participants is essential. Ultimately, these reflections of mine serve as a foundation for understanding the deeper dynamics at play in preserving and engaging with the histories and voices we serve.

Toward a Living Archive of Care

A digital archive is not an endpoint, but a living dialogue.

This moment matters deeply because it highlights the profound impact of war, displacement, migration, and the erasure of communities. It reminds us that through ethical oral history, we have the power to resist these forces, to seek justice, and to preserve stories that might otherwise be lost. Reflecting on this, we recognize that every voice, every narrative, becomes a vital act of reclaiming identity and History itself. In this way, ethical oral history transforms from a methodological practice into a form of resistance, an act of hope and resilience that affirms our shared humanity and sparks a collective commitment to remembrance and justice.

Looking ahead to futures where refugee women’s stories shape the global record. An invitation to fellow archivists, students, and memory workers to co-create, to engage not merely as stewards of history but as active participants in shaping the narratives that define us. This call echoes a recognition of the collective power we hold, not just to preserve the past, but to interpret and reinterpret it through our shared efforts. It invites us to ponder the significance of our roles, the fluidity of memory, and the profound impact of collaborative reflection in fostering a deeper understanding of our histories and identities. In embracing this invitation, we open ourselves to new perspectives, fostering a community rooted in mutual learning and curious inquiry that can sustain us in our ongoing quest to make sense of the intricate tapestry of human experience.

Sources

Akacha, K. (n.d.). Hijabi woman kneeling by puddle in refugee camp blowing bubbles [Photograph]. Pexels.

Archaeology Magazine. (n.d.). Oracle bones. Archaeology. Retrieved August 14, 2025

AXP Photography. (n.d.). Reliefs and hieroglyphs on wall [Photograph]. Pexels.

Grele, R., & Thomson, A. (Eds.). (2020). The Oxford handbook of oral histories. Oxford University Press.

Kütükoğlu, B. Ş. (n.d.). Close-up of cuneiform carvings [Photograph]. Pexels.

Library of Congress. (1936-1938). Slave narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938 [Collection].

Ritchie, Donald A.. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford Handbooks, 2020) (pp. 492-493). (Function). Kindle Edition.

sim1111. (n.d.). Tape library [Photograph]. FreeImages.

Smithsonian Magazine. (2017, February 17). Museum offers 15,000-letter deciphering oracle bones. Smithsonian Magazine.

Thirdman. (n.d.). Women hugging each other [Photograph]. Pexels.

World History Encyclopedia. (2009-2025). Cuneiform. World History Encyclopedia.

The Refugee Archive continues a longstanding tradition of amplifying the voices of displaced women, ensuring their stories are heard, preserved, and not silenced. Here, I share my thoughts on why recording oral histories is important and how this practice is adapting in the digital era. Currently, I am at the stage of actively engaging with and documenting oral histories as part of my fellowship. Reflecting on the history and methods of oral history feels particularly important to me now because it provides essential context and depth to the stories I am capturing, ensuring they are preserved accurately and meaningfully.

This reflection also helps me understand how my work aligns with The Refugee Archive’s broader mission of amplifying the voices of displaced women. By appreciating the origins and evolving techniques of oral history, I can contribute to a legacy that not only preserves individual stories but also promotes the collective memory and resilience of refugee communities.

Introduction

Why do oral histories matter?

Exploring this highlights the significance of oral stories and explains why they are essential for preserving culture, knowledge, and personal narratives.

Oral histories are more than just spoken memories; they are powerful vessels of culture, identity, and lived experience. For countless communities around the world, especially those historically marginalized or underrepresented in written archives, oral storytelling has been a primary way of transmitting knowledge across generations. These narratives preserve not only the facts of events but also the emotions, values, and worldviews that tend to shape them.

Exploring the importance of oral stories allows us to recognize their role in safeguarding cultural heritage while passing down wisdom and humanizing history through personal perspectives. In places where formal records are scarce, censored, and/or inaccessible, archiving oral histories offers a vital alternative: they reclaim agency. Validating the memories of those who are often overlooked while challenging dominant narratives. They connect us with our ancestors who have since passed on by helping us honor the ancestors from within ourselves, and to champion everyday life when it comes to times of conflict or change, we give rise to the voices of individuals whose stories might otherwise be forgotten.

In understanding why oral histories matter, I bring an invitation of reflection. A reflection on my own journey into the deeper dimensions of storytelling. Not just as a method of archiving, but as a practice of listening. A practice of honoring, and a practice of learning through another’s journey. Their lessons of triumph and resilience. In a digital age, where much is lost to speed and brevity, archiving oral narratives reminds us to slow down and take pause. To listen with the power of presence. Staying present in the intimate act of sharing one's own voice of truth. So now, I will turn our attention to how we got here. Where did the practice of archiving oral histories come from? Was this practice as old as human civilization itself? Where did we go from here? We will explore this in the next section, examining the historical context of archiving oral history as a method.

As I explored the roots of how and why human civilizations have archived oral histories, given that oral histories predate written records. This is particularly evident in the indigenous communal storytelling traditions of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, which date back approximately 10,000 years.

I delved into learning about the ancient histories of the Sumerian and Assyrian, with their development of the Cuneiform, the Egyptians with the hieroglyphs, and the Chinese with their ancient oracle bone writings, which date back 2 millennia BCE.

This exploration highlights the vital role that oral tradition has played in preserving cultural identity and collective memory across millennia. When I think about the beginning of writing systems, stories, myths, and knowledge that were transmitted orally, I see it acting as a foundation for the development of early societies. While the transition from oral to written history marked a significant evolution in human communication, it allowed for more complex and enduring records. Yet, despite this shift, I found that oral histories remain a powerful means of cultural preservation, especially among indigenous communities, where storytelling continues to serve as a key link to ancestral traditions and wisdom throughout time.

Cuneiform

The Cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians are some of the first known written records, dating back to 3300-3200 BCE. They were used not just for trade over long distances, but also for myths, relating documents to their kings, and then eventually for their everyday life. According to the World History Encyclopedia, the word Cuneiform means “wedge” or “wedge-shaped” due to the way they used a reed stylus to cut shapes onto clay tablets, thus giving it its name (World History Encyclopedia, 2009-2025). There were also various types of Cuneiform. One of them is the oldest on record, dating back to about 3350 BCE, which documents cattle records and trade deals along the Mesopotamia. It then evolved into intangible subjects such as the quest for immortality, romance, and documenting the “will of the gods.” (World History Encyclopedia, 2009-2025). So, from a pictoral script from a word concept script, the proto-cuneiform became what is known as the archaic-cuneiform, which dates to 2900 BCE. This gave rise to the Epics of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish. (World History Encyclopedia, 2009-2025)

Hieroglyphs

Combining logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, Egyptian hieroglyphs are used in both civil and personal inscriptions, such as tomb stories and letters, creating a cohesive system of written communication. The word "hieroglyph" comes from the Greek hieroglyphikos, meaning "sacred carving," reflecting the belief that hieroglyphs were created by the god Thoth. The ancient Egyptians called their writing system mdju netjer, meaning "the words of the gods," which is a similar sentiment to the later forms of the Sumerian and Assyrian cuneiform. The earliest dated examples of hieroglyphs have been found in tombs dating to around 3200-3000 BCE. The use of hieroglyphs declined during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, eventually being replaced by the Coptic script. The last known hieroglyphic inscription dates to 394 AD. (World History Encyclopedia, 2009-2025)

Oracle Bones

Chinese oracle bones. Documenting not only rituals but also questions and decisions.

Chinese oracle bones, also known as Jiaguwen, are inscribed animal bones (primarily ox scapulae) and tortoise shells used for divination during the late Shang Dynasty in ancient China (roughly 1600-1046 BCE). These bones are incredibly significant because they represent the earliest known examples of systematic Chinese writing. The inscriptions on oracle bones are considered the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters. They provide a crucial glimpse into the origins and evolution of the Chinese language. Over 4,600 unique characters have been identified, with around 1,300 already translated. Oracle bones were first discovered in 1899 near the city of Anyang in China's Henan province, a region that corresponds to Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang Dynasty. Initially dismissed as "dragon bones" used in traditional medicine, their true significance was gradually recognized by scholars (Archaeology News Online Magazine, 2025). According to Archaeology News Online Magazine, deciphering the complex and archaic script was a challenging process. The vast quantities of oracle bones unearthed at Yinxu provided irrefutable proof of the Shang Dynasty's existence and revolutionized the study of ancient Chinese history(Archaeology News Online Magazine, 2025).

Assyrian Libraries

Assyrian libraries, such as Ashurbanipal’s, exemplify early institutional archiving of knowledge and narratives. The famous library of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization boasted other libraries and tablet collections within its cities, highlighting a widespread appreciation for knowledge, learning, and literacy. Located in Nineveh, which is the capital of Assyria, its significance is widely recognized as the oldest known systematically organized library in the world, according to World History Encyclopedia. Its contents held a vast collection of over 30,000 clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform, covering a diverse range of subjects like literature (including the Epic of Gilgamesh), religious texts, scientific treatises (astronomy, medicine, mathematics), historical records, and administrative documents (World History Encyclopedia, 2025). In its discovery, it was excavated by the British Museum in the mid-19th century, with significant discoveries made by Sir Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam. According to the British Museum, the fire that destroyed Nineveh in 612 BCE ironically baked the clay tablets, preserving them for over 2,000 years (World History Encyclopedia, 2025).

Overall, these ancient methods show the impulse to document life, not unlike what oral historians do now. Refugee women today, like ancient scribes, are “inscribing” their lives into record, using voice instead of clay or papyrus. This continuity highlights the enduring human desire to preserve personal and collective histories across different eras and media. Whether inscribed on tablets, recorded in oral testimonies, or shared through digital recordings, the act of documentation serves as a powerful tool for empowerment, resistance, and remembrance. It underscores the importance of voice and narrative in shaping identity and ensuring that stories survive beyond individual lifetimes, forging a vital link between the past, present, and future.

Archiving Oral Histories in Modern History of the 18th-20th Centuries

The rise of archiving oral history has become increasingly significant in both academic and activist circles, as it provides a vital avenue for capturing personal narratives and firsthand accounts that might otherwise be lost. This method enriches our understanding of historical events and social movements, making history more inclusive and diverse.

In the realm of modern history, oral histories have shed light on crucial topics such as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, tracing the journey from the Caribbean Basin to the Americas while highlighting the profound human experiences associated with these events. For example, the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project (Library of Congress, 1936–1938) recorded over 2,300 firsthand narratives from formerly enslaved people in the United States, creating one of the most significant collections of African American oral history.

Archiving oral histories also encompasses the impacts and memories of the World Wars and the Civil Rights movement. In Europe, survivor testimonies from World War II and the Holocaust became central to memorial museums and education programs. In Australia, Indigenous elders worked with ethnographers to safeguard Dreamtime stories, ensuring their survival amid colonial pressures.

The origins of formal archiving also intersect with colonial histories, such as the French colonial record-keeping that both documented and silenced certain voices. As we move further forward in time, oral histories document the stories of immigrants and refugees, preserving their struggles, resilience, and contributions to society. Even women pioneers across various fields have been spotlighted through personal testimonies, revealing their often-overlooked roles in shaping history.

By the mid-20th century, oral history had become a recognized academic method, with institutions such as Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office pioneering systematic approaches to recording, storing, and studying these narratives. The widespread adoption of oral history emphasizes the importance of listening to diverse voices, thereby fostering a more comprehensive and empathetic understanding of our shared past.

The Digital Turn in Archiving

The transition from analog to digital technology represents not just a technological shift but also a profound reflection on how we relate to and preserve our collective memory. From the humble beginnings of tape recorders to the ubiquity of modern smartphones, every stage of technological evolution prompts us to consider the implications of these tools in shaping our understanding of information. When I sought the perspective of experts in the Oxford Handbook of Oral Histories, the authors noted that

“...regarding digital storytelling as a format for critical analysis, the cultural historian Michael Coventry asks: How does a digital telling of a story relate to the practice of critical reflection?7 Where do digital strategies enhance critical reflection, and where do they hinder it? With regard to the presentation of critical analysis, we also ask: What are the benefits and limitations of the digital performance of an analysis, as opposed to the more traditional written essay format?” (Ritchie, Donald A., 2020)

The questions posed by Coventry invite us to consider the evolving relationship between digital storytelling and critical analysis. As digital narratives become increasingly prevalent, they offer unique opportunities for engaging audiences in reflective ways that traditional formats may not. Reflecting on this, it becomes clear that while digital storytelling can be a powerful tool, it requires careful balancing to ensure it enhances depth rather than diminishes it. The questions about benefits and limitations are vital, urging us to consider how we can harness digital formats to deepen understanding and foster meaningful reflection. Furthermore, as we navigate this digital landscape, questions about metadata, security, file formats, and platform accessibility have led me to ponder the impermanence and permanence of digital data and the systems we use. This ongoing transformation challenges us to think deeply about society, culture, and individual rights, urging a careful reflection on the ethical dimensions of our digital future.

Focusing the Lens: Refugee Women and Archival Silence

The question of who gets remembered, and how they are remembered, touches on the very essence of history, identity, and memory. Too often, the stories of refugee women are filtered through institutional gatekeepers such as governments, NGOs, and international agencies, whose agendas shape which voices are amplified and which are left unheard. These narratives can be reframed, reduced, or selectively recorded to fit a policy goal, a funding pitch, or a national narrative, rather than to reflect the storyteller’s truth.

By exploring how gender, displacement, and erasure intersect, we are reminded to pay closer attention to the stories of those pushed to the margins. Refugee women’s testimonies are not just personal histories; they are essential components of our collective memory. To truly honor them, oral history work must strive to remove unnecessary filters and allow women to tell their stories in their own words, for their own purposes, resisting the urge to translate, edit, or repurpose them to fit an external agenda.

When we listen on their terms, without presuming the outcome, we begin to close the gap between what is remembered and what is erased. We also challenge the systems that decide whose histories matter. This is how we begin to shift from archives of omission toward archives of care, where every voice has the power to stand as it was spoken.

Listening as a form of care becomes a powerful act, an intentional effort to give voice to these women. To honor their experiences and to foster visibility of the connection they bring, while bringing our understanding a bit closer. Documenting refugee women’s stories becomes more than just keeping a record; it is a way to bridge these gaps in how we see what they see and to challenge the forces that seek to silence them. That ensures their presence and struggles are recognized in the larger story of humanity. Reflecting on these harrowing stories and the careful digital archiving process, I emphasize the importance of attentive listening and thoughtful storytelling as acts of resistance and affirmation. These practices highlight the transformative power of every voice.

Sources

Akacha, K. (n.d.). Hijabi woman kneeling by puddle in refugee camp blowing bubbles [Photograph]. Pexels.

Archaeology Magazine. (n.d.). Oracle bones. Archaeology. Retrieved August 14, 2025

AXP Photography. (n.d.). Reliefs and hieroglyphs on wall [Photograph]. Pexels.

Grele, R., & Thomson, A. (Eds.). (2020). The Oxford handbook of oral histories. Oxford University Press.

Kütükoğlu, B. Ş. (n.d.). Close-up of cuneiform carvings [Photograph]. Pexels.

Library of Congress. (1936-1938). Slave narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938 [Collection].

Ritchie, Donald A.. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford Handbooks, 2020) (pp. 492-493). (Function). Kindle Edition.

sim1111. (n.d.). Tape library [Photograph]. FreeImages.

Smithsonian Magazine. (2017, February 17). Museum offers 15,000-letter deciphering oracle bones. Smithsonian Magazine.

Thirdman. (n.d.). Women hugging each other [Photograph]. Pexels.

World History Encyclopedia. (2009-2025). Cuneiform. World History Encyclopedia.

I remember sitting in a small room lit by a single bulb, my son asleep beside me, as I recorded my story for the first time. My hands trembled. Not just from fear—but from the weight of finally being asked to speak. Not as a statistic or a victim, but as a full human being with a life before and after displacement. That moment became my entry point into oral history, and it is what fuels my work today with The Refugee Archive.

In the last few weeks, I’ve undertaken a research journey mapping existing oral history projects that document the lives of refugee women, especially female-headed households (FHHs) This wasn’t just academic. It was a process of reflection, connection, and vision-building. As a woman who has lived through genocide, lost a husband and a home, and now builds a life for my son and parents in exile, I came to this work as both a scholar and a survivor.

I focused on seven remarkable initiatives: Migration Voices Oral Histories (Australia), The Archive of Refuge (Germany), In Her Own Words: Voices of Sudan, Telling the Real Story (UNHCR), Woman Alone – The Fight for Survival by Syria, Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) in Lebanon, and Sawt: An Oral History (MENA). Each project offers its own methodology and purpose, yet collectively they tell us something deeper about who gets to speak, who gets heard, and how refugee narratives are shaped, shared or sidelined.

Uncovering Gaps: Where Are the Female-Headed Households?

One striking pattern quickly emerged: while many archives include women’s stories, very few center the specific reality of female-headed households (FHHs). Even in women-focused projects, the emphasis is often on gendered violence or motherhood in broad terms—not on the leadership, decision-making, and survival roles women take when they are the sole heads of their families.

This absence is not because FHHs are rare. According to UNHCR estimates, nearly one in four refugee households is headed by a woman—yet their stories remain largely invisible. They are underrepresented not because their experiences are unimportant, but because intersecting systems of exclusion—economic, social, cultural, and institutional—work together to keep them out.

Many are silenced by stigma, retraumatization, or time poverty. I know this intimately. When I was first invited to share my own story, I hesitated—not because I didn’t believe in its value, but because I feared retraumatizing myself or upsetting my family. The thought of revisiting the pain, of exposing wounds that still felt raw, was overwhelming.

And layered on top of that were the daily pressures—earning a living, caring for my young son and aging parents, and navigating a system not built for women like me. There was simply no space—mentally or logistically—for storytelling. Like so many other women in my position, I was too busy surviving to sit down and narrate.

Some are deterred by long interviews or intimidating formats. Others feel their lives are too ordinary to be worth documenting. But it’s precisely those “ordinary” acts of endurance, caretaking, and persistence that history needs to remember.

At the Refugee Archive, our work seeks to honor this truth by building a legacy project: a lifetime digital library of full-length oral histories told by and for FHHs. Not a one-off study. Not an emergency campaign. A lasting, living archive that centers the everyday and the often-unheard.

Models to Learn From—and Avoid

There are several powerful models of refugee oral history that The Refugee Archive can learn from. Projects like Telling the Real Story by UNHCR and In Her Own Words: Voices of Sudan emphasize informed consent and approach oral history as a political and rational act—not just documentation. Similarly, POHA and Sawt show how oral history can resist erasure, honor intergenerational memory, and embrace the full complexity of women’s lives in exile.

What these strong models share:

• They build trust over time

• They invite community involvement

• They avoid reducing narratives to trauma or inspiration

• They treat storytelling not as a product, but as a relationship

Best Practices to Emulate:

• Community co-authorship: Women participate in shaping their narratives and approving final versions

• Multilingual access: Stories are shared in original languages, with translation as needed—not replacement

• Return of recordings: Contributors receive copies of their stories for personal or community use

• Ongoing contact: Projects maintain relationships beyond the interview, offering updates and inclusion

Models to Avoid:
In contrast, some initiatives—often backed by media platforms or large international NGOs—risk perpetuating harm. These projects may:

• Collect stories without informed consent or follow-up

• Frame refugee women as symbols of suffering or resilience for external audiences

• Prioritize polished, emotional content over ethical process

• Leave communities feeling extracted from, rather than included in

One-time storytelling efforts with no return, reflection, or reciprocity can retraumatize participants and hollow out the purpose of oral history.

Our Commitment:

The Refugee Archive must do better. It should be built on long-term relationships, shared ownership, and a deep commitment to representation, reciprocity, and dignity.

Methodologies and Motivations: What Shapes the Story?

Each project I reviewed approached storytelling differently. Telling the Real Story uses video interviews to inform potential migrants. POHA offers over 1,000 hours of testimonies from Nakba survivors, catalogued academically. Migration Voices and Sawt blend podcasts with education and cultural preservation.

Format matters—but so does intent. Stories gathered by grassroots collectives like Sawt feel more urgent and intimate. The tone shifts when storytellers are collaborators, not just subjects. Funding and institutional backing bring quality and reach, but can also impose narratives that align with donor goals.

This is why The Refugee Archive must remain community-rooted and transparent. We aim not only to gather stories but to hold them with care and accountability. This isn’t just about what gets told—but how, why, and with whom.

Who Tells the Story? Who Benefits?

There is immense power in narrative control. When stories are shaped by policy agendas or academic goals, there’s a risk of depersonalization—or worse, exploitation. The best projects I studied center agency. They let women speak in their own words, in their own language, on their own terms.

Our archive must do the same. It must be multilingual, decentralized, and relational. It must ask not only whose stories are told, but who owns them—and what happens after the recording stops.

We envision co-authorship models where women shape their own transcripts, approve edits, and have the final say in how their narratives live on. In this way, storytelling becomes not an extraction—but a form of authorship, resistance, and reclamation.

Looking Forward: A Call to Listening

Based on what I’ve seen, I hope The Refugee Archive becomes a dynamic, living testimony that does more than collect stories. I envision a space where refugee women—especially those leading households—can reclaim their narratives and share them on their own terms.

This archive should hold not only words but also silences, confusion, resistance, and imagination. It should challenge traditional ideas of what deserves to be preserved—valuing grief, care, protest, humor, and daily life as historically significant.

This vision includes a slow-built, trust-based network that grows through relationships—not through extractive practices. We aim for an archive that listens more than it speaks, that moves at the pace of trust, and that creates a sense of belonging rather than a platform for performance.

Above all, I hope it becomes a refuge for voice—not just a space where women talk, but where they are genuinely heard, believed, and valued.

We’re still holding questions that shape our path forward:

Access & Inclusion

• Who is absent, and why?

• What barriers—emotional, logistical, linguistic, political—are keeping certain women or communities from entering the archive?

Ethics & Power

• How do we engage without forcing, romanticizing, or retraumatizing?

• Who owns the story?

• How can we share and circulate these stories without re-extracting from already-exploited lives?

Narrative & Representation

• What counts as an archivable story?

• Are we privileging certain genres—trauma, survival, success—over others like joy, doubt, desire, or boredom?

• Can silence or refusal also be part of the archive?

Care & Aftermath

• What happens after the recording?

• How can this project materially benefit the women involved?

• How do we ensure it doesn’t end up as another beautiful-but-distant project?

This is not just about memory. It’s about power, presence, and future-making. The Refugee Archive has the potential to model what a decolonial, feminist, justice-driven archive can look like. And that is both rare—and necessary.

If you’re curious to hear more, including my own story, stay close. We’ll be sharing soon on our Substack platform, The Refugee Archive. Subscribe to follow the journey—and listen to us, as new voices find their space, strength, and audience.