Our Archives

Living Refugee Archive Collections

Introduction to our Archives

Archives have a very important role to play in documenting our history and heritage, preserving our memories; recording our testimonies and reinforcing identity creation.  How can we document the history of migration within our archives?

Welcome to the Living Refugee Archives online resource. This website has been developed by staff within UEL’s Library and Learning Service Archives department to provide a central resource for accessing our digital and physical collections.

Further details on all of our Archival collections held at the Living Refugee Archive and the University of East London Archives can be accessed through the links below.

Our Archives

Association of Ukrainian Women Archive
British Ugandan Asians at 50 Archive
The Cambridge Refugee Support Group Archive
The Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) Archive.
The Charter 87 Archive.
The Council for At-Risk Academics Archive.
The Crossing the Borders Oral History Archive.
The Eastside Community Heritage Hidden Histories archive. Oral Histories on Somali Seafarers ; Ugandan Asians; refugees from the Hungarian Revolution.
From East to West: The History of Ugandan Asians Archive.
The Gujarati Yatra Oral History Archive.
Haringey Welcome – No Small Victories Archive.
The Healing the Wounds Oral History Archive.
The Northern Refugee Centre Archive.
The Qisetna Digital Archive.
The Refugee Rights Europe Digital Archive.
UNHCR: the London Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees Audio-Visual Archive.
The Voices of Kosovo in Manchester (VoKiM) Oral History Archive.

Why Refugee Archives?

Are refugee archives well-represented in relation to the preservation of lived experience of refugees and migrants? If not, why is this? Who gets excluded from refugee-archives, and in what ways? How could we improve access to refugee research archives?

Initial research that we have undertaken has indicated that archives which detail issues pertaining to migration and refugee issues within the UK are potentially scattered between a number of different archival institutions. One of the projects we would like to undertake in order to further develop and enhance the Living Refugee Archive will be an archive mapping project which we hope will eventually lead to the beginning of a more comprehensive overview of the range and types of archival collections that exist which can help to reflect the voices recorded within this collections to a wider audience.

Our aim will be to incorporate both traditional physical collections and to map these in combination with newer forms of archival collections, including community archives, born digital archival collections, oral-history recordings and multimedia collections.

The Docklands Library at the University of East London has, for two decades now, been the home of the Refugee Council Archive.  Originally established in 1951 as two separate organisations, the British Council for Aid to Refugees (BCAR) and the Standing Conference on Refugees (SCOR), the Refugee Council has a long history of providing support and assistance to refugees from across the world.

Since the arrival of the Refugee Council Archive at UEL in November 2002, our Archival collections have continued to develop and expand both in the fields of refugee and forced migration studies and beyond.  The Mission Statement for the UEL Archives now reads:

“The Archive seeks to identify, collect and preserve original and unique records that document the history of the University and its academic interests, and to facilitate their accessibility for teaching and research use by academic staff, students, local communities and the wider public.”

The UEL Archives therefore play a key role in supporting the learning, teaching and research needs of the University.  Our current archival collections support UEL learning, teaching and research in the fields of refugee, conflict and forced migration studies; theatre studies and sports and Olympic studies.