Amplifying Refugee Voices in Academia: An Interview with Dr. Alfred Babo

Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?: Reflections on the Paradox of Inclusion and Exclusion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) brings together refugee scholars’ personal narratives and reflections across disciplines. The volume explores the challenges and contributions of exiled academics, showing how they reshape conversations about inclusion, knowledge, and humanitarianism in Western higher education.

To start, could you introduce yourself and tell us about your connection to the Refugee and Migrant Education (RME) Network?

I am Alfred Babo, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Fairfield University. I am also the Director of the International Studies Program. As a refugee scholar originally from Cote d’Ivoire, I have been in the field of refugee studies and working with refugee organizations like Scholars at Risk and Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants through research and teaching. I learned about RME through the Fairfield University Center for Social Impact and its Humanitarian Action Program. And in 2024, I applied and was accepted to attend the November Conference in Rome.

What led you and your co-editor to bring together Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)? 

I co-founded the initiative Share the Platform (https://www.sharetheplatform.org/) with three colleagues, Prof. Anita Fabos, Creg Mortley, and Leora Khan in 2019. It seeks  to amplify the voices of refugees and immigrants in matters related to their conditions. I realized that, within academic and the broader production of knowledge, very few exiled scholars have had the opportunity to engage intellectually with and critically analyze their conditions. When I hosted  my colleague Sayed Hassan (now my co-editor) at Fairfield University in spring 2022, we agreed to develop a project that would provide exiled scholars with a platform to reflect on their situations through rigorous scholarly analyses. 

Your volume brings together first-hand narratives from refugee scholars across disciplines. What inspired you to focus on personal narratives as a key part of the book, and how do you see them contributing  to reshaping conversations around the tensions between refugees working in academia and humanitarian discourse?

Personal narratives are key to the work we intend to share with the audience. However, as scholars, we aimed to go beyond the “exotic” nature of storytelling. Instead, we aimed to frame these narratives within  intellectual reflection by refugees themselves. This is why we drew on an auto-ethnography approach. By reshaping the personal narratives with academic discussions and discourses, the contributors to this volume did not just tell their stories; they used them to question central concepts in the field of refugee studies, like humanitarianism, integration, exclusion, knowledge production, transnationalism, etc.  

Beyond sharing their first-hand experience, what role do you see refugee scholars playing in reshaping research agendas, pedagogy, and institutional priorities in academia?

In this volume, the authors and contributors are calling on the audience –  especially higher education institutions’ top administrators, managers of refugee agencies and organizations, and governmental agencies – to recognize or even center their actions on the intellectual capacities and skills of these refugees after the emergency response. What must be a priority for host institutions is how these intellectuals, who happen to be refugees, can meaningfully contribute to research, teaching, and the broader development and production of knowledge as part of our shared universal intellectual capacity. 

For NGOs, universities, and independent researchers working  to support displaced academics, what practical insights or recommendations do the contributions in this volume offer?

NGOs, universities, and other institutions supporting and working with and for refugee scholars must prioritize these intellectuals’ academic knowledge and skills to contribute to research, teaching, and the development and production of universal knowledge. In practice, there are many limitations and elements of exclusion based on social and cultural categories such as race, language, ethnicity, scholarship. The authors of this book urge  Western institutions, which have generously welcomed exiled scholars, to go further by actively dismantling these barriers and creating space where refugee scholars can thrive as intellectuals and colleagues.  

What long and short-term shifts in humanitarian discourse around refugees would be most valuable in academic settings, either based on your own experiences or the content of the book? 

In the short term, we hope to see higher education institutions and refugee agencies place greater emphasis on the intellectual capacities of exiled scholars to work on their integration. This can be best achieved by sharing the platform of their reflections and actions with the refugees themselves. 

In the long term, a deep reflection on the concept of refugees and humanitarianism is a very meaningful project to consider based on real-life experiences. Our book offers a foundation  for such a reflection on what should be the new humanitarianism in an era of fear of others, especially anti-immigrant and refugee policies in the West.