Dr. Khangelani Moyo

Q1. Who are you?

I am an independent researcher and a research fellow at the University of the Free State, Qwaqwa campus in South Africa. I have a background in Migration Studies, Urban Studies, Sociology, and Social Anthropology. My research interests include migration management, refugee governance, migrant transnationalism, spatial identity in the city and social vulnerabilities in the urban peripheries. I am currently an FFVT fellow at the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen Nürnberg (CHREN). As part of his fellowship at CHREN, I focus on refugee integration in Germany.        

Q2. What was your motivation for applying for the FFVT fellowship? Why Germany?

I applied for the fellowship off the back of my research visit to Freiburg in 2021, where I was hosted by the Africa Centre for Transregional Research (ACT). Taking up the FFVT fellowship in Erlangen was about extending the work that I had started in Freiburg, focusing on refugee integration in Germany. The idea of doing field research in Germany extends the exchange possibilities between scholars from and based in the global South and those in the global North.

Q3. What do you expect from the fellowship?

The fellowship provides an opportunity to extend my work on refugee integration in Germany and have mutually beneficial conversations with colleagues in Erlangen who engage in related research. This will help grow my networks in Germany and may result in future collaborative work.            

Q4. What is the focus of your work, and what is innovative about it? / What are your planned outcomes and activities for the fellowship period? And how do they relate to your FFVT hosting institution/ the FFVT cooperation project?

My work focuses on refugee integration in Germany, particularly the conditions of asylum and the systems in place to support successful refugee integration in the cities of Freiburg and Erlangen. The research is exploratory and guided by the idea of reciprocal research, which subverts the common practice where researchers from the global North do research in the global South. Instead, it is underpinned by the need to create more avenues for researchers from the global South to conceive and do research in the global North contexts. In this regard, reciprocal research forms an emergent frontier in the global debate on the decolonisation and decentring of knowledge production, both geographically and intellectually.

I intend to use my time in Germany to draft a working paper from my research in Freiburg and also do some fieldwork in Erlangen. I will engage in theoretical discussions and enriching conversations and also present some of my work in a seminar to expand the scope of intellectual exchanges.

The exchanges with colleagues and networking are part of the core mandate of the FFVT, and CHREN has a vibrant scholarly presence within the field of forced migration studies.