Academic privilege

From Wedded to the Land: Gender, Boundaries and Nationalism in Crisis, by Mary Layoun (Duke University Press, 2001), page 7, talking about the author’s relationships with Greek and Lebanese refugee and displaced woman in Cyprus:

Their stories and sometimes trust and brief friendship in exchange for coffee (or orange juice) were unabashedly predicated on my privilege as someone who could come and go at will, who could gather stories or read texts and retell them to a different and differently empowered audience. There was less recrimination in their pointed observations about that privilege than a resolute insistence that it be used to convey something of their own determination, resourcefulness in duress, and expectations for change.

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