This year the Gil Loescher Memorial Fund has made awards to Teresa Irigoyen-Lopez, doctoral candidate in Area Studies (China), Ouzra Karimi, a doctoral candidate in Migration Studies and Muhammed Zeyn, also a doctoral candidate in Migration Studies.
The prize winners’ research projects cover a diverse range of topics, here are some brief insights:
Teresa Irigoyen-Lopez
Chinese urban anthropology and labour migration
Teresa’s DPhil project explores what it means to live a life that is constantly in motion yet increasingly constrained. After sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Qingtian, a major overseas migrant hometown in China, she is now conducting follow-up fieldwork in Europe, travelling with families who were unable to sustain return and were compelled to leave again for their former host countries.
Teresa writes, “I began this project by asking how migrants rebuild lives after return; yet I repeatedly encountered ‘failed’ returns and fractured futures shaped by labour precarity, racialisation, legal constraint, nationalistic discourse, and intergenerational obligation. My research traces the exhaustion of lives repeatedly uprooted—bodies worn down by movement, families compressed into ever-narrower possibilities, and a claustrophobic sense of isolation that travels with them across borders. Attending through affect theory to everyday labour, built spaces, and the infrastructures that organise movement and waiting, I aim to show how imagined voluntary migration hardens into coerced re-migration, and how circulation comes to feel less like mobility than entrapment.”
Ouzra Karimi
Exploring Hazara Women’s entrepreneurship and textile trading in the diaspora through embroidery and social media
Ouzra’s research examines Hazaragi embroidery as a form of gendered labour, cultural practice, and livelihood among Hazara refugee and migrant women across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the UK. It explores how embroidery practices are maintained, transformed, and revalued under conditions of forced displacement, and how women draw on textile work to negotiate economic survival, cultural continuity, and social belonging.
The Hazaras are an ethnic minority from central Afghanistan who have experienced long histories of persecution and political violence, resulting in repeated displacement and the formation of extensive diaspora communities. Within these contexts, embroidery continues to hold social and cultural significance, yet the conditions of its transmission and practice have been profoundly reshaped by migration.
Traditionally, Hazaragi embroidery has been learned within households and passed down between women across generations, embedding skills, memory, and identity within everyday domestic labour. In diaspora settings, particularly in the context of second-generation migrants, these practices have become increasingly fragile as first-generation migrants age and younger women encounter fewer opportunities for sustained learning. Yet at the same time, embroidery remains an important source of income for Hazara women in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where garments are produced for diaspora markets through informal trade networks and digital platforms. Ouzra’s research, focuses on how Hazaragi embroidery practices are maintained, adapted, or abandoned across displacement.
Muhammed Zeyn
The Role of Social Media in the ‘Harmonization’ and Settlement of Syrian Refugees in Turkey
Following the December 2024 collapse of Syria's fifty-three-year Assad regime, approximately 1.4 million Syrian refugees have returned from Syria's neighbouring countries, creating unprecedented conditions for studying voluntary repatriation. Muhammed’s DPhil project investigates how social media mediates this mass return: from ‘go and see’ exploratory visits documented online, to returnee testimonies revealing tensions between emotional homeland attachment and material reconstruction realities.
The research examines how digital platforms enable civic participation in Syria's transitional governance, with citizens using social media to hold authorities accountable and influence policy reversals within days. Through comparative qualitative analysis of refugees navigating Türkiye's prolonged exile and returnees experiencing Syria's liberated atmosphere amid devastated infrastructure, the study illuminates how contemporary displacement resolves in digitally mediated contexts.
About the Gil Loescher Memorial Fund
The Gil Loescher Memorial Fund supports research with a connection to refugees or forced displacement, ideally with policy relevance. Awards are for up to £2000, and eligible costs include travel, subsistence, and data collection costs in any region of the world. All graduate students at the University are eligible to apply, although priority will be given to applicants from the Global South and/or with lived experience of displacement.