Refugee and asylum-seeker stories are being preserved for future generations as the Trojan Women Project expands its living oral archive into Scotland, following a series of sold-out performances in Stirling.
Founded in 2013 by award-winning foreign correspondent and filmmaker Charlotte Eagar and award-winning filmmaker William Stirling, the project combines oral history, theatre and storytelling to give people who have fled war, persecution and political oppression the opportunity to tell their own stories.
The project’s latest expansion has seen refugees and asylum seekers from Ukrainian, Afghan, Sudanese, Syrian and other backgrounds come together with local people in Stirling. Weekly workshops combining drama, storytelling and oral history culminated in sold-out performances at Macrobert Arts Centre on 24 and 25 September.
Alongside the performances, participants are creating a permanent oral-history archive intended to be housed at the University of Stirling, preserving first-hand accounts of displacement as part of Scotland’s historical record.
Its podcast, ‘Why Am I In Your Country?’, forms the public-facing part of the growing archive. Hosted by Eagar, Stirling and Luna Laurenti, it takes listeners beyond the statistics and headlines to hear directly from refugees and asylum seekers about the lives they left behind, the events that forced them to flee and what happened when they arrived in Britain.
The stories collected through the project illustrate the personal histories behind migration, from Iranian photographer Mina – who describes surveillance and restrictions on women in Iran, the aftermath of the death of Mahsa Amini in state custody in 2022, and the experiences that eventually led her to flee the country – to Afghan artist and former Afghan Businesswoman of the Year Samira Kitman, who describes escaping Afghanistan after receiving death threats and her efforts to preserve the work of Afghan artists.
Charlotte Eagar, co-founder of the Trojan Women Project, said: “Refugees are often talked about in terms of numbers, crises and headlines, but behind every statistic is a human life, a family, a history and a story that deserves to be heard.
“We created the Trojan Women Project because we believe those stories should not disappear when the news moves on.
“By recording people’s experiences in their own words and preserving them as an oral archive, we are creating a lasting record of what displacement actually means, not just for those living through it today, but for generations to come.”
William Stirling, co-founder of the Trojan Women Project, continued: “Drama is an ‘archive of human emotion’, capturing not only what happened to people, but their memories, voices and lived experiences.
“Theatre gives people a different way to tell their stories. When someone stands on stage and speaks about what they have lived through, it becomes something shared between the person telling the story, the people listening and the community around them. That is why we see the archive and the theatre as inseparable: one preserves the voice, while the other allows that voice to be heard”
With 16 episodes currently available, ‘Why Am I In Your Country?’ continues to grow alongside the archive, which brings together recorded testimony, podcast interviews, performance and the memories generated through the project’s workshops.
For Eagar and Stirling, the archive is about preserving more than facts and dates. Drawing on Euripides’ 2,400-year-old tragedy ‘The Trojan Women’, which centres on civilians displaced by war, the project uses theatre as a way for contemporary refugees to explore and share their own experiences.
The Scottish project builds on more than a decade of work by the Trojan Women Project. In Hounslow, approximately 120 refugees and asylum seekers took part in 40 workshops over 11 months, culminating in a 2025 production featuring participants from communities including Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Iran.
The oral-history material is intended to be housed at Gunnersbury Park Museum.
For more information about Trojan Women Project, please visit the official website.
To listen to the podcast, please visit: Why Am I In Your Country? on Apple Podcasts