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| Barbara Harrell-Bond 1935-2018 (credit: Refugee Studies Centre) |
Richard Carver writes:
Barbara Harrell-Bond, who had a good claim to be the founder
of refugee studies, died
last week at the age of 85. According to her friend and colleague Themba
Lewis, she was “surrounded
by her family and her files,” which sounds about right. There have already
been tributes and obituaries aplenty and there will be many more. I want to
write about something that has not been mentioned in any of the tributes I have
seen: namely that Barbara’s highly distinguished teaching career concluded with
the eight years she spent from 2011 at CENDEP.
I first met Barbara in 1985. She had recently completed the
fieldwork for the book that became Imposing
Aid, a study of refugee livelihoods in southern Sudan that has had an
extraordinary influence on the field. I had just started as Amnesty International’s
researcher on Uganda and had, or so I thought, made an appointment with the
director of Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme (RSP) to interview
her about Ugandan refugees in Sudan. I went to her home, a large ground-floor
flat in a grand Victorian villa in North Oxford. The experience was disconcerting,
to say the least. Barbara apparently had no recollection of our appointment;
she handed me a file of documents, sat me on a sofa and disappeared, not to
return for an hour or so. The house was full of people, mostly Africans,
wandering to and fro and apparently very busy on purposes unexplained. Over the
course of an afternoon, Barbara granted me a few minutes now and again, and I
left in some frustration, having discovered none of what I was looking for.
My next encounter with Barbara was several years later when,
completely out of the blue, she invited me to come and teach at the RSP. I had
no academic qualifications at the time, my only connection with Oxford University
being some unhappy undergraduate years. I also had very little experience of
the topic that I was to teach: refugee livelihood and economy. The Oxford
powers-that-be thought I was an exceptionally poor choice, but Barbara didn’t
give a fig for university authorities, so I was in. It later dawned on me that I
was there not for some previously unsuspected expertise in livelihoods, but
because of my human rights work. This corresponded with a new turn in Barbara’s
own work that would culminate in her second great book, Rights in Exile, written with Guglielmo Verdirame.
In 1996, Barbara retired from Oxford University, or rather
she was retired, very much against
her will. This prompted perhaps the most influential phase of her career,
establishing refugee studies centres in Kampala and Cairo, both with a more
activist bent than had been permitted in Oxford. Then she returned, to a
slightly less grand North Oxford flat, but one still marked by that constant
flow of people and hum of activity. What might have been a retirement for most
people – a real one this time, as she was now well into her seventies – became simply
a new phase of activity. She established a new organization devoted to
refugees’ legal rights and continued with extraordinary energy as both
expert witness and informal adviser.
The academic research was now in the past, but not the
teaching. In 2011, I was trying to put together a new module on refugees as
part of our DEP Masters programme. The difficulty with a broad, introductory
module like this is that it is extremely multidisciplinary. Someone like me
(legal scholar, historian) can cover the law and history, but not the
anthropology, sociology, psychology… and so on. I needed help, which arrived in
the form of three excellent and charismatic scholars and teachers: Barbara
herself, Giorgia Dona, and Helia Lopez. Typically, both Giorgia and Helia were
people I got to know through Barbara, which remains pretty much how things are
in the world of refugee studies. Barbara herself initially taught two sessions:
one on “representing refugees” and the other on refugee camps, to which she was
passionately opposed. After a while, she no longer had the energy for two
sessions, so just gave the class on representation – essentially an
introduction to refugee status determination, laced with anecdotes from her own
experience.
In the classroom, various of Barbara’s characteristics came
to the fore. I have never known anyone for whom the expression “doesn’t suffer
fools gladly” was more appropriate. She tended towards impatience with less
gifted students, but most of all she was intolerant of those who made no effort.
In one famous incident, passed down from cohort to cohort as a piece of DEP
folk history, she threw out a student who admitted to not having done the
reading for her class. I was appalled, yet the interesting thing is that while
the students were chastened none of them, not even the one affected, took
against Barbara because of this. Indeed, they generally adored this
increasingly tiny figure, struggling in later years to hear or be heard, but
still with the sharpest intellect and (when she deemed necessary) the sharpest
tongue.
A number of students took up the offer to go and volunteer
with Barbara and the Rights in Exile programme or, best of all, to receive her
advice on their dissertation research. On the odd occasion this did not work
out so well, but those who braved Barbara’s criticism won her respect and
benefitted from an enormous generosity with her knowledge and wisdom.
Our class always has several students who are or have been refugees. I think that the strong connection with these students came because Barbara’s distinctive contribution to scholarship was to restore the centrality of refugee agency. Today this might seem trite and
obvious, but only because Barbara’s work has been so influential that it is now
a commonplace. Much refugee studies literature is in the realm of public
policy, but I think that, at root, Barbara was not in favour of any policy
towards refugees. Simply give refugees their legal due and allow them to run
their own lives.
In recent years, Barbara several times referred to Brookes
as “the university in Oxford that actually cares about refugees.” Of course,
this was a dig at her old employer as much as it was a genuine compliment to
her new one, but we were still happy to accept it. We should return the
compliment: Barbara Harrell-Bond was the scholar who actually cared about
refugees.
