An interview with Dr Tesfalem Yemane
Dr Tesfalem Yemane is a Visiting Fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy (SSP) and a 2023 SSP Doctoral Graduate. We sat down with Dr Yemane to learn more about his doctoral and postdoctoral journey at Leeds.
When you completed your PhD, you received a Research Excellence Award for your PhD thesis. What did that award mean to you, and how did it feel to get that along with successfully passing your Viva?
It means a lot to get your work recognized and especially by two of the most prominent scholars in their own fields. It was also very, very special to see a childhood dream being realised.
In Eritrea, I come from a very humble background and growing up, my parents moved mountains to send us to school. When I did my undergraduate degree in Eritrea, I said, “OK, the next step is then to do my Masters, to go for my PhD,” because I always saw education as the key to success. I had that childhood dream; I had that burning passion in me. However, because of the political situation and education policies in Eritrea, opportunities for postgraduate studies were very limited.
When I left my country in 2010, I went to Sudan and lived in a very small, geographically isolated refugee camp in the eastern part of the country. In the camp too, there was not any opportunity, but I never stopped dreaming and hanging onto the hopes of one day doing a PhD. Importantly though, people in the refugee camp had the humanity, the kindness, and the warmth of a decolonial sociality and kinship. But in terms of what we wanted, ie, pursuing our careers and our education, it was completely disconnected.
I remember when we were in the camp, some people used to buy internet bundles from the capital city, Khartoum, and open internet cafes in the camp. Sometimes we used to skip lunch in order to pay for the internet and look for scholarship opportunities in different universities around the world.
This PhD has been 10 years in the making. So, when I got this recognition… I immediately went back to what I have been through, what we have been through as refugees collectively - our migration journeys and experiences. The challenges, the dreams, the pain, but also the hope that we carried with us.
It was a bit of an emotional event when they said, “We would like to recommend this for a Research Excellence Award”. I'm not much of a crier, but I was struggling to hold the tears back. So, we all cried, even the supervisors. As a refugee, I don't want to extraordinarise this as saying this is an extraordinary achievement, but sometimes you doubt yourself, “Am I going to make it? Am I going to get the opportunity?”
You will never think about getting this opportunity from that small refugee camp in Sudan. This is the achievement that you want and it’s a privilege to be recognized for what you have done.
So you went from Eritrea to Sudan in 2010?
Yes. Eritrea to Sudan in 2010. And then from Khartoum to China.
When I went to Khartoum, I did not have legal residence permit as a refugee because we were not recognised as refugees by the Sudanese government. So it was very difficult to sit for English language proficiency exams like IELTS exams or TOEFL exams for example. I visited the British Council and American language test centre in Khartoum, but I was turned away as I ‘did not have residence permit in Sudan’. It was very difficult, but I found ways of sitting for my language proficiency exams. Luckily, I got a Chinese Government scholarship. I lived in Beijing for two years. I did my masters in International Relations at Tsinghua University, one of the top universities in China.
In China, I checked with the British Embassy if I could apply for a family visa from there, but I was told to go back to my country and make my application. Then I went back to Africa again. I went to Uganda because I could not go back to my country and so I lived in Kampala. Then I came to the UK in 2014. I did my second Masters at Bradford University, in African Peace and Conflict studies. Then I came to Leeds University for my PhD.
We've talked about your journey to PhD study. Thinking about the PhD journey itself, what were the biggest challenges for you?
Financially it was challenging, because I was self-funded. When I started my PhD full time, I didn't have a scholarship. I had a relatively good job in the refugee sector. I reduced to working part-time and I was doing the PhD full-time as a self-funded student. Even though I got a partial scholarship (tuition fee waiver) halfway through, the financial aspect of it was one of the main challenges of the PhD journey.
Juggling time between work, study, doing a full time PhD and then family…then we had the Covid-19 pandemic…balancing all that was also another challenge. I was working and I had a young family, with both parents working. It's not easy and the PhD is such a commitment. It's an investment, so sometimes you ask yourself, “Am I letting down my children? Am I letting down my family? Am I doing justice to my project? Am I doing justice to my supervisors?”
You always think, “Am I getting the balance right?” in terms of how you invest your time and juggle the commitments: family commitments, job, the full time PhD studies…
Added to that is also the fact that, as a refugee, I am also an activist, community organiser and advocate for political change in my home country. I'm very involved in the refugee sector, in our community but also in transnational politics… There is a lot that goes on alongside the PhD commitment.
Sometimes being a mature student, you always wear different hats, and especially as a refugee, because you have friends and family members in different refugee camps in different countries, for example. There was a lot that I had to juggle emotionally but also practically here.
What kept you motivated and what kept you inspired?
This was a passion project for me. As a refugee myself, I follow the discussions by the British political and media class about refugees and asylum seekers in the Global North in general, and particularly in the UK, and you see how sometimes people – asylum seekers and refugees – who want to come to the UK are vilified and dehumanized by racio-colonial discourses, very toxic anti-asylum policy and political conversations. My PhD project sought to examine and understand why refugees, in my case particularly, Eritrean refugees, want to come to the UK.
In terms of why people want to come to the global north or Europe or the UK, sometimes the policy conversations, the media – especially right-wing tabloids – tend to be very ahistorical and decontextualised in talking about the destination factors and historical understandings of why people want to go to a specific country.
So I said, “Maybe I need to bear witness”. Maybe I need to say something by drawing upon my lived experience of how I saw the UK as a preferred destination, for example. Or how I see a specific country, mainly English-speaking countries – such as America, Canada, Australia, the UK in our case – as preferred destinations for asylum, tied to educational reputation, tied to colonial languages. I tried to understand how important destination factors such as language and colonial education policies were used to expand and enroot the colonial and imperial project by locating their relevance in generating imaginaries of asylum destinations in the postcolonial present.
The fact that this was a passion project kept me motivated and energised in the face of the financial difficulties and pandemic lockdowns. It was the idea of bearing witness that kept me going.
I was also lucky to be surrounded by wonderful people: my beautiful family, my friends, and my supervisors. I want to pay tribute to my supervisors. They took me under their wings. They knew my limitations and my situation. They understood who I am and what I want to do, and all the family commitments I had to deal with on top of the PhD. They have been very kind to me, and very supportive. Furthermore, the supportive environment I had from the school – including the late Matthew*, may his soul rest in peace – was key in terms of how I was welcomed and accepted in the School. I think it was a combination of these factors that kept me motivated.
*Matthew Wilkinson worked as Postgraduate Research Administrative Lead within the School of Politics and International Studies and the School of Social Policy and Sociology. Matthew took early retirement in April 2021 after fifteen years’ service to the University. He sadly passed away in July 2021. The PGR suite on Level 12 has been named after Matthew, to honour his memory.
Speaking about your activism and the different hats you wear, how did you maintain your passion for your PhD, knowing that the unique contribution to knowledge that you were making through your PhD was important, valuable and worthwhile alongside your activism and work?
They mutually reinforced each other, because there was an element of experiential and embodied knowledge in terms of what I wanted to do in my PhD. It was very much shaped and informed by my everyday experience, my everyday conversations as part of the Eritrean community here in the UK, and also as part of my frontline work in the UK refugee and migration sector. They were mutually inclusive.
As a student, you read literature, you read theories, but I was also coming from the NGO refugee sector and had first-hand lived experience of some of the things that I was engaging with theoretically as part of my PhD. I think there was an important alignment and helpful coherence.
So it was working out how to bring the conceptual, theoretical debates, standpoints and approaches into dialogue with my lived experience, as someone who has been through the journey myself, but also as someone who has worked with people who are going through different immigration journeys, both in the UK and beyond.
What impact do you hope your research will have? In terms of the research that you have done so far through your PhD, but also your current research and the research you hope to do in future.
Given the political landscape and context we are living in… I don't want to be pessimistic, but I'm realistic in terms of what policy contributions I could make. My PhD was not a policy-focused work. It was more of a theoretical contribution and intervention in the existing scholarship on asylum and refugee geographies and movements.
I engage with post-arrival lived experiences in the UK as people go through the different immigration recognition regimes: the asylum process, the refugee recognition regime, the journey to citizenship. I examine their actual lived post-arrival experiences, which have very important policy implications.
My hope is that they will contribute to policy conversations, making informed policy decisions whether at a local, regional or national level. There is an element of hope. It's more of a hope than a realistic expectation that this will make a massive change, but I hope that maybe it creates conversations. Maybe it gets picked up by other students and scholars who focus on policy aspects of the asylum system in the UK.
Theoretically, I hope it brings some nuance in terms of the entanglements between history, colonial legacies, colonialism and coloniality. How imperial and colonial structures were re-deployed and re-created in the metropole, and how the same logics now apply in the post-colonial present – the metropole in this case being the asylum-hosting state. What are the methods and the modality of sustaining some of these colonial entanglements? What does it tell us in terms of how refugees and migrants are racialised and stereotyped and dehumanized in the postcolonial present, in the postcolonial space?
I'm currently working on the Channel Crossing project at the University of Liverpool, which tries to understand the phenomenon of irregular migration in and around the English Channel crossing. The hope in the research project team is to contribute to policy and scholarly debates about the phenomenon of the channel crossing. We hope to contribute to debates on: how the policy approach by successive governments impacts the mobilities and immobilities of people - refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers - on the move across the English Channel; and on how the same policies are also impacting the UK refugee sector, exhausting the sector, and stifling spaces and opportunities to imagine humane, alternative asylum policies in the UK.
I hope to make some contributions as part of this new project and then in the future to do some publications from my PhD that could maybe go out to the wider world.
You were very active in co-organising conversations and seminars and other activities alongside your PhD. Was that part of your effort to take your work to wider audiences? Could you tell us a bit more about that side of your PhD journey?
I worked in the NGO refugee sector for 8 years, as an Employment and Education Advisor in Leeds. The sector is my home. I was very much embedded in the sector. Being a mature student – mature as in I started my PhD at a later age and stage in my professional career and in my journey – I wanted to see the PhD as more than just my specific PhD project. I wanted to take the opportunity to engage in other activities as well: getting to know more people; learning about collaborative work; organising conferences, workshops and events; bringing people from the sector to the University; creating spaces for dialogue between practitioners and academics. I always wanted to use the academic space as an important element of engaging in broader social and political issues, not just entrench myself in the PhD research.
By the end of your studies, yes, you have your PhD, but what other skills have you learned as a PhD student? It's organising academic conferences, bringing into dialogue the practitioners’ world and the academic theoretical world. Sometimes academia becomes a bit of an abstracted theorisation of things, so I wanted to bring the best of what I had as a practitioner in the refugee sector; to engage with different colleagues and friends in the sector, do some writing, do some blogs and reports, which were also very much informed by both aspects of my journey.
I wanted to take it as an opportunity and as a challenge. I was juggling a lot of commitments, but I wanted to challenge myself to lead on some conferences and conversations, and we had some really successful events and conferences over the years. Sometimes one has to be lucky to be surrounded by like-minded people. I have wonderful friends here, PhD students who share the same motivations and interests.
Can you tell us more about the Visiting Fellowship? What it means, what you are working on and what the transition has been like for you from PhD student to Visiting Fellow?
The transition has been very smooth. It helped a lot that I know everyone in the school, I know the school infrastructure, I know the offices, so I feel always at home. At SSP, I'm continuing the association with what has been my intellectual home over the last five years.
If you allow me, I also want to mention, in addition to the school being my academic home - and I say this as a refugee, as someone who engages in diaspora politics, in conversations on Eritrean politics, for example – the school has been also my political home in so many ways. The PhD Suite, the pods on level 12 – the school has offered me a sanctuary. I always use those spaces to do recordings for example, to engage in conversations about Eritrea's political situation, diasporic conversations and debates and discussions with my compatriots in different parts of the world.
This is home for me intellectually and politically, and everyone has been very welcoming. The transition has been, I think, just a change in rooms, in terms of how I feel about the School and its spaces. It has been very smooth. Obviously, it’s a massive relief to complete the PhD and just focus on my work. What I want to do, as part of my fellowship, is to continue the conversations, maintain the link and affiliations with the school and hopefully do more work with colleagues.
I am working with my mentor, Ipek [Demir, Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies] on a few ideas, one of which is facilitating a new Decolonial Reading Group as part of CERS, so it's mainly CERS Postgraduate Researchers and Early Career Researchers and interested staff. Everyone from across the university with an interest broadly on migration, race and decoloniality is also very welcome.**
I also hope to engage in conferences, give some talks and do some co-writing with my mentor.
I have an intellectual mentor, someone under whom I want to also grow and learn academically about writing. So I am looking forward to continuing the conversations with colleagues. I have met a few colleagues already and I want to continue that.
**The CERS Migration, Race and Decoloniality Reading Group is now up and running.
You talk about the School being your intellectual and political home. What are your favourite places on campus?
There are a few. I love coffee! I love Cafe Miro, one of the independent coffee shops opposite the Parkinson Building. I know the people there – we have a level of trust that is very important. It's one of my go-to places.
In our school, the three PhD pods are very, very important to me and close to who I am and what I have been up to over the last few years, whether for conversations, supervision meetings or doing recordings. I have a YouTube channel that I co-run with my friends – Eritrean friends in the diaspora. We do a lot of recordings in Eritrean language, so this has always been my space. Not many people know about it, but I was telling my mentor and the Head of School, “This is not only a PhD space for me, this is also a space of political conversations and agitations, transnational politics, diasporic engagement and policy conversations”.
Of course the libraries too. Also the PhD suite. This is the space that I met some incredible friends and made friendships both in the UK, but also globally.
The kitchen is also one of the best places, I should emphasize that. You meet friends from POLIS [the School of Politics and International Studies], friends from our School of course. It's a space to catch up, to vent, to share experiences, a space to support each other as well. You meet someone and say, “Oh, how are things?” And then you have conversations, you share experiences over coffee. So the kitchen has also been a very, very important space for us PhD students.
Now you are working on two big collaborative projects: the White Rose collaboration and Channel Crossings. Can you tell us more about this experience - of working on two large-scale collaborative projects?
I did some collaborative work when we were organising conferences. This work is building on that, not only in terms of the practice of organising something, but also practising what it is to collaborate intellectually. What is it like to engage with people who come from different theoretical standpoints? How can you learn from each other? What do I learn as a student? I'm a student of course, given who is involved in the White Rose network and the Channel Crossing project, so it has been so far a very intellectually and academically nourishing experience to be in the same space in conversation with so many incredibly knowledgeable people with such academic and scholarly calibres.
We have had a few events as part of the White Rose network in Sheffield and in Leeds, incredibly rich thought-provoking and stimulating conversations about our common areas of interest on migration, and the same with the Channel Crossings project. It also helps that there broadly is an overlap in terms of the intellectual conversations even between the two projects.
Broadly speaking, they are about the politics of asylum and migration policies both in the UK and beyond, and about international relations and the geopolitics of asylum destinations. It helps that there is some theoretical, thematic and political alignment between the two collaborative projects. There's some synergy between the two.
You have given us so much to think about. Thank you for everything that you have shared with us.
Thank you.
This interview was conducted as a pilot for a new interview series spotlighting members of our School community.