An interview with Dr Tesfalem Yemane

In December 2023, Dr Tesfalem Yemane graduated from the School of Sociology and Social Policy with a PhD and a special mention for Research Excellence.

Dr Yemane became a Visiting Fellow in the School in January 2024, and is based in the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS). 

We sat down with Dr Yemane earlier this year to learn more about his PhD journey and the transition from doctoral graduate to Visiting Fellow. The interview is a pilot for a new series in which we hope to spotlight members of our School community, learning about the varied research and student experiences within the School.

We include a short excerpt from the interview below, and invite you to read the interview in full on our website.

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, i.e., 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.

What kept you motivated and what kept you inspired on your PhD journey? 

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 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.

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.