Teaching Difficult Histories through Migration Literature: An Empathy-Based Inclusive Pedagogical Framework

Abstract

Histories of forced migration remain difficult to teach because they enter the university classroom not simply as completed events, but through inherited memories, contested narratives and uneven relations to the past. Migration literature can bring students closer to the lived consequences of displacement; however, such encounters do not automatically produce historically informed or ethically responsible understanding. This paper develops an empathy-based inclusive pedagogical framework for teaching difficult histories through migration literature in higher education. Adopting a conceptual and integrative approach, it brings scholarship on difficult histories, literary learning, empathy and inclusive pedagogy into a shared conversation. The framework reconceptualizes empathy as a pedagogically cultivated form of engagement that must remain historically situated, critically reflexive and inclusively enacted. These principles are organized through five connected movements: historical and positional grounding, situated literary encounter, multiperspectival reading, dialogic inquiry and reflective reorientation. Partition literature is used as an illustrative pedagogical medium, not as the paper’s central object of literary analysis, to demonstrate how narrative can connect historical context with lived experience while preserving difference and interpretive complexity. The paper argues that the value of empathy lies not in emotional identification alone, but in the conditions through which students are enabled to question, revise and extend their understanding. Its contribution lies in positioning inclusive pedagogy as the condition that makes empathic engagement historically responsible, critically demanding and meaningfully accessible across diverse university classrooms.