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Graduate Profiles

Students in the PhD in African Studies approach a wide range of topics from a variety of methods. Here, a couple of recent graduates discuss their work at Edinburgh and subsequently.

Dr Tanja Hendriks

What was the subject of your doctoral dissertation?

My doctorate -- entitled The Malawi State in Relief: An Ethnography of Civil Servants Navigating Duties, Dependencies and Disasters in a Rural District -- was a study of the everyday practices of governing of Malawian civil servants working for the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA).

What sort of research did you conduct for it?

My research was part of a bigger project which looked at the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa (ANTHUSIA). I conducted one year of ethnographic fieldwork in a disaster-prone rural district in southern Malawi in 2019. This was the year in which Cyclone Idai caused massive flooding in many parts of the country, directly affecting more than 1 million Malawians. For twelve months, I followed a DODMA officer in a disaster-prone rural district, as he went about his job. Whereas the literature and my own previous experiences in Malawi largely seemed to suggest that the state was not very active or prominently present in protecting and providing for its citizens, I realized very quickly how central state agents are to large scale humanitarian relief interventions – even when these are implemented by numerous non-state organisations and in a profoundly aid-dependent and resource-poor context. Therefore, my research ended up emphasizing civil servants’ sense of duty and the manifold ways in which they try to do their job to the best of their abilities, despite not having the resources necessary to achieve the results they aim for.

What have you pursued after your degree?

Fascinated by this sense of duty that I found so striking in the field, I took time during my last year of the PhD to write a research proposal to get funding for a postdoc project that would focus on further investigating this. After I defended my doctorate in September 2022, I began working as a postdoctoral research fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium in November that same year. My project, funded by FWO, is called Duty and Diligence in Disasters: Civil Servants in the Climate Change Crisis in Malawi. I am conducting additional fieldwork in Malawi to explore the everyday work of DODMA civil servants at national level in order to supplement my findings from the district level, while also expanding my dissertation into a book. I have so far published two articles based on the fieldwork I conducted for my dissertation; one in Etnofoor and one in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.    

Dr Elisa Gambino

What was subject of your doctoral dissertation?

My PhD project, titled “The Political Economy of Sino-African Infrastructural Engagement: The Internationalisation of Chinese State-Owned Companies in Kenya”, was part of the broader African Governance and Space (AFRIGOS) project in CAS, focused on the development of transport corridors in Africa. My doctorate was a study of the development of the key large-scale infrastructure projects with Chinese participation in Kenya, with a focus on Lamu port.

What sort of research did you conduct for it?

My work was qualitative, involving semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations in Chinese construction sites in Kenya. In terms of interviews, I worked with government officials, policymakers, company directors, and representatives from non-state actors both in Kenya and China. While I began this project thinking that my research would focus on the drivers of China-Africa engagement in the infrastructure sector, I realised that the modalities through which companies internationalise were more crucial, thus leading me to engage more closely with how companies’ embeddedness shapes their spatial expansion.

What have you pursued after your degree?

I defended my doctorate in 2021 and began as LSE Fellow in the International Politics of China at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), before moving to the Global Development Institute of the University of Manchester in 2023. In the process, I have expanded my work on Chinese companies’ internationalisation, beginning to look at private companies’ internationalisation modalities as well. This led to my current project, titled “African Hubs, Chinese trade, and Global Circulation”, for which I was awarded a Hallsworth Fellowship in Political Economy at Manchester.

Dr Kamau Wairuri

What was subject of your doctoral dissertation?

My doctorate, entitled “Beyond policy accountability: responses to police abuse by people at Kenya's urban margins,” was a study of how people respond to police abuse. Previous studies have showed that marginalised groups – e.g. poor, young men, sex workers and queer people – are subjected to disproportionate police abuse, but there had not been systematic analysis of how they respond to this abuse. My study contends that we need to go beyond the idea of Police Accountability, that is often presented as the solution to police abuse, and consider the strategies deploy when they have been victimised by the police. I highlighted the individual and collective self-help strategies as well as the recruitment of intermediaries to help them counter power imbalances, navigate officialdom, and avoid further harms. 

What sort of research did you conduct for it?
My study was primarily based on interviews and focus group discussions with young men, sex workers and queer people. I also conducted interviews with selected officials in government and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as journalists. Initially, I had designed my study to focus on the victimisation of poor, young men. However, while conducting my scoping field work, I realised that police abuse affected more groups of people who had received very limited scholarly attention. I expanded my study to include some of these groups in order to build a deeper understanding of this crucial socio-political phenomenon.

What have you pursued after your degree?

I defended my doctoral thesis in June 2022. I was appointed as a Lecturer in Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University soon afterwards. I am currently developing my thesis into a book, while exploring the policing of the marginalised groups in Kenya more deeply.

Dr Ismaël Maazaz

What was the subject of your doctoral dissertation?

My PhD entitled "Divided Waters. A Hydropolitical Analysis of Development, Space and Labour in N'Djamena, Chad" was an exploration of the politics of water access and supply in the capital city of Chad. It looked at the power dynamics that frame the water landscape of this city, at the intersection of development studies and anthropology.
 

What sort of research did you conduct for it?

Based on ethnographic field research conducted in N'Djamena, the dissertation focused on the patterns and actors involved in drinking water access and supply. It mostly draws on observations and interviews with water workers, municipal officers and other policy-makers, as well as end-users. The work emphasises that social relations associated with drinking water are entangled with developmental, labour and spatial patterns. It speaks to ongoing debates around urban water politics in the Global South and contributes to challenge the natural scarcity narrative by highlighting how drinking water is intensely politicized.

What have you pursued after your degree?

After my degree, I was based at the University of Lyon in France where I undertook a Saltire fellowship funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and which aims to promote mobilities of Scotland-based scholars. This fellowship led to conduct additional field research in Chad, but also in Cameroon and Burkina Faso. In September 2023, I began a postdoc research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Tampere in Finland.

Dr Tosin Durodola

 

What was the subject of your doctoral dissertation?  

My PhD thesis, titled “Does Refugeehood Ever End? Cessation, Homing, Labelling, and Resettlement Dreams Among Post-Cessation Liberians in Nigeria,”examined what happens after people officially lose their refugee status. It analysed how displacement continues even after legal recognition ends, focusing on first-generation “residual” Liberian refugees in Nigeria. The study looked at how people rebuild a sense of home, how they are labelled by institutions, host communities, and themselves, and why many continue to hope for resettlement abroad even when the institutions responsible no longer recognise them. The research was funded by the School of Social and Political Science PhD Scholarship (2022–2025) and received the 2025 SPS Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. The findings were published in Refugee Survey Quarterly, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

 

What sort of research did you conduct for it?  

I conducted six months of ethnographic fieldwork with first-generation “residual” Liberian refugees in and around the former Oru Refugee Camp in Ogun State, Nigeria. I used interviews, group discussions, and observation to understand people’s everyday experiences. I also spoke with local community members, government actors, and refugee agency officials.

Through these methods, I traced the trajectories of three groups: those who returned to Liberia but later fled again, those who were not selected for resettlement, and those who tried to settle locally but were abandoned by implementing agencies. The findings demonstrate that the withdrawal of refugee status does not resolve displacement but produces new forms of precarity, pragmatic economic strategies, and protracted uncertainty, where exile persists long after formal protection has ended.

What have you pursued after your degree?  

Following my PhD, I joined the Refugee Law Initiative (RLI) at the School of Advanced Study, University of London as a Visiting Research Fellow, where I am developing my thesis into a monograph. The full proposal is currently under review, and I also secured a book contract as lead editor for the volume “The Making and Unmaking of Displacement Labels: Institutions, Experiences, and Protection Politics” with expected publication in 2028. I lead the RLI Working Group on “Understanding Solutions,” which I established and co-convene to examine policy, legal, and everyday responses to displacement in protracted settings. I am also co-editing a special issue arising from this work with a leading refugee studies journal. Alongside this, I have two further papers from my earlier research in press with Ethnic and Migration Studies and Refugee Survey Quarterly.

Dr Megan Douglas

What was the subject of your doctoral dissertation?

My doctoral thesis, Pursuing the good life: displacement, inclusion, and wellbeing among Congolese in Nairobi, Kenya, looked at the everyday experiences and conceptualizations of ‘the good life’ among Congolese living in Nairobi, Kenya. I looked at Congolese migrants not as distant ‘others’ or ‘sufferers’, but as individuals with values, aspirations, and strategies for a better life than the one presented to them by the government or humanitarian regime. I argue that migrants in the city forge inclusion and wellbeing through practices including the leveraging of fluid identities, development of social interdependencies, and cultivation of spaces of belonging.
 

What sort of research did you conduct for it?

I conducted nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi between 2018 and 2019. Most of my field research was split between Nairobi’s Central Business District and one of the outlying informal settlements, Kabiria. I conducted focus group discussions, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, and engaged in participant observation. For this, I followed Congolese to their places of worship, work, and study; accompanied them on shopping trips to local markets; apprenticed at a hair salon; attended a fashion photoshoot; and shared countless cups of tea, all the while learning about the ways in which these individuals’ aspirations and desires for inclusion, fulfilment, and wellbeing are pursued and realized.
 

What have you pursued after your degree?

After my degree, I worked in the charity sector in Edinburgh supporting refugees and asylum-seekers, then joined the Centre for African Studies at the University of Edinburgh as a Teaching Fellow. Following this, I moved from academia to professional services, joining the University of Edinburgh’s Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program team as the Coordinator for the Wits Edinburgh Sustainable African Futures (WESAF) Doctoral Programme.
 

Dr Clayton Boeyink

What was the subject of your doctoral dissertation?

My PhD thesis entitled, 'The Politics and Practises of refugee self-reliance in trifurcated states of North-western Tanzania', examined the shrinking space of asylum and protection refugee camps in Tanzania from 2017-2020. I situate this in a longer history of containment and manipulation of people movements by the state since the colonial era. The thesis centres around a series of shutdowns of refugee markets and programmes, such as a popular cash transfer project funded by the World Food Programme (WFP). This was designed to destroy economies and make self-sufficiency impossible, impelling refugees to repatriate. From below, I see how these affect the livelihoods of refugees and how they enact agency by circumventing the state and co-opt humanitarian structures to establish livelihoods in the camp.

What sort of research did you conduct for it?

Living in the village next to the camp for 7 months in 2017, with follow up visits in subsequent years, this research was primarily qualitative, utilizing interviews and participant observation. I conducted a 'financial diaries' methodology, which followed up with 70 households every two weeks for a year to record their income, expenditures, and debts to understand how their lives were impacted by state and humanitarian intervention. I conducted initial visits and hired refugee researchers to continue and scale this methodology. Follows-ups included questions about refugees' mobility plans and attitudes toward camp events. These repeated follow-up build strong rapport and trust and allowed for candid discussions about sensitive topics. This led to learning about interesting and under-researched topics such as cartels controlling the resale of food rations and the trade networks stretching across the region or the illicit agricultural industry surrounding the camp where refugees rent or provide paid labour on abundant farmland.

What have you pursued after your degree?

I was fortunate to transition directly to a Postdoctoral Fellowship for the UK government-funded project called the Displaced Somalis and Congolese (DiSoCo) project. For 3.5 years, I was the lead coordinator of the £3-million+ project, aimed at understanding healthcare at the intersection of gender and displacement amongst displaced Somalis and Congolese in Somalia, DR Congo, Kenya, and South Africa. With a team of 50 researchers in six countries, I took the lead in co-designing and training all research activities including developing safeguarding/ethics protocols; data collection, management, analysis; and academic/policy write-up. At the completion of the project in 2023, I returned to Iowa, USA, where I grew up, to be closer to family. I have worked for nearly 2.5 years for Lutheran Services in Iowa running the refugee resettlement program where I also manage additional employment, case management, elderly care, and other services for refugees and immigrants. This has been entirely upended since the election of President Trump. I have also used my expertise to work with Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law to testify as lead witness, successfully preventing a young Burundian refugee from being unjustly deported. During and after my PhD I have published 15 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, have been a guest editor of two special issues, written multiple academic blogs and policy briefs, news articles in Foreign Policy and The New Humanitarian, and even had my article on food aid cartels featured by David McKenzie, one of the World Bank's most cited economists, in his Development Impact Blog. I still try to do some academic writing, with a forthcoming chapter on 'International Refugee Law in Tanzania' in The Oxford Handbook of Tanzanian Politics. Hopefully someday I can return to researching on a more full-time basis again.