Oral History and Collective Memory: Documenting Refugee Voices and the Challenges of Archival Representation

This paper will explore the concept of preserving refugee rights in the records that we keep, and will explore how we have undertaken civic engagement and outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers in London and beyond to explore ways of documenting their stories through the us of bottom-up oral history methodologies and the use of objectives and textiles as a means of preserving collective memories and a new modes of representation beyond the traditional written word. It will also consider the role of ethics and the role of archives in documenting under-represented communities.
The Refugee Council Archive at UEL is a growing collection of archival materials documenting the refugee experience. This paper will reflect on our work exploring the very nature of what we mean by the concept of an “archive,” and explore the challenges of bottom-up methodological approaches for helping to preserve the collective memory of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in way that enables their voices to be heard in a positive way and is documentation along the best methodology to achieve this.