“Free of Mind,Though I Am a Refugee”: Borderless Graduate Education and the Politics of Knowledge Production

Abstract

This study explored the significance of, and possibilities for, graduate education in protracted refugee situations. It focused on Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps, where just 2% of students have access to higher education of any kind. Drawing on theorization of migrant temporalities and coloniality in education in emergencies, we considered the implications of graduate schooling for individual aspirations and the politics of knowledge production. We argue that, for alumni, Dadaab’s first camp-based master’s program fostered personal development, opened new pathways for physical and cognitive mobility, and fomented refugee-led scholarship and activism. Still, while refugees’ outcomes were framed as collectivized efforts to catalyze social change, they remained deeply gendered and constrained by bordering regimes, funding frameworks, and Western onto-epistemologies.

Introduction

In 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched its “15by30 Roadmap,” which sought to increase global refugee enrollment in tertiary education from 1 to 15% by 2030 (UNHCR, 2023). While humanitarian actors, institutions, and refugees themselves have long advocated for basic education to be included in emergency responses to crises, higher education has only recently become a policy priority. Advocates point to higher education’s role in advancing livelihood opportunities and labor market access for refugees (Jacobsen, 2019), fostering personal growth (Archer & Leathwood, 2002), and advancing local and international peacebuilding agendas (Coffie, 2014; Rasheed & Munoz, 2016; Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative [RRLI], 2023). Dryden-Peterson and Giles (2010) argued that postsecondary education can shift refugee futures from “precarity to possibility” (p. 5). Still, access remains deeply circumscribed. As of 2025, only 9% of refugees globally attended any form of tertiary-level schooling (UNHCR, 2025).

Although increasing scholarly attention has been paid to refugee student experiences in undergraduate education (see, e.g., Arar, 2021; Bhabha et al., 2020; Giles & Miller, 2021; Ramsay & Baker, 2019), the purposes of, possibilities for, and experiences in graduate-level education in contexts of forced migration have been scarcely considered. Postgraduate education holds unique potential, however, to shift both individual trajectories and the politics of knowledge production in refugee and forced-migration studies. ¹ People living in camps are among the most over-researched communities in the world (Omata, 2019). With 80% of refugees residing in the Global South, a stunning 90% of research on refugee issues originates in the Global North (Neang et al., 2022). The voices of African scholars in particular are missing from critical debates on migration (Landau, 2019).

This article explores how refugee scholars who completed the master of education (MEd) program in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps through the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) Project understand the role and significance of graduate education in their lives. In 2013, a consortium of Canadian and Kenyan universities and nongovernmental organizations created BHER to foster more expansive and gender-equitable higher educational opportunities in Dadaab, one of the world’s oldest and largest refugee camp complexes (Giles & Miller, 2021). BHER offered hybrid in-person and online coursework in situ, rather than scholarships that require students to leave their families and communities . In 2018, BHER launched a research-focused MEd program in Dadaab—among the first of its kind globally. By 2024, 28 refugee and host-community students from across East Africa and the Horn earned an MEd degree while remaining in the camps.

As a transnational, North America– and East Africa–based research team that includes both graduates and former university-based leadership of the BHER program, we drew on 22 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with BHER alumni to consider the following questions: (1) How do refugee scholars make sense of and experience postgraduate programming? (2) What opportunities and barriers do they face as they transition out of the program and into new roles? and finally, (3) How can postgraduate education support efforts to localize knowledge production and/or decolonize forced-migration studies?

With insight from anthropological studies of migrant temporalities (e.g., Brun, 2015; Massa, 2023; Poole & Riggan, 2020) and theorization of coloniality in education in emergencies (e.g., Koyama & Turan, 2024; Menashy & Zakharia, 2022; Shah et al., 2025), we argue that postgraduate education can foster personal development, open new pathways for physical and cognitive mobility, and foment refugee-led scholarship and activism. Still, alumni pathways are deeply gendered, and both individual and collective outcomes remain constrained by bordering regimes, funding frameworks, and epistemic hegemony.

Refugee Education: Purposes, Possibilities, and Limitations

In an education-in-emergency (EiE) frame, basic schooling is considered a humanitarian project—a space for psychosocial well-being, protection, and livelihood support (e.g., Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies [INEE], 2024; Mendenhall et al., 2024). Advocates and refugees themselves point to EiE’s economic, political, and humanistic rationales (e.g., Finatto et al., 2022; Tertiary Refugee Student Network [TRSN], 2019). K–12 schooling is also understood as a key means to increase gender equality among refugee communities and foster a range of positive outcomes associated with educating girls and women (e.g., Bishop et al., 2021; Dagane et al., 2023).

In the context of refugee warehousing, however, there is considerable ambiguity about the purposes of schooling (Brun & Shuayb, 2024; Dryden-Peterson, 2017). Given schooling’s traditional role as a tool of nation building, refugees—whose membership in any polity remains uncertain—complicate straightforward understandings of what schooling is tasked to do, with implications for curriculum and pedagogy (Waters & Leblanc, 2005). Refugees on average spend 20 years in displacement, with the UNHCR’s traditionally preferred durable solutions of repatriation, local integration, or third-country resettlement increasingly failing to reflect the reality of refugee lives (Bradley, 2019; Dryden-Peterson et al., 2019; Hyndman & Giles, 2017).

Over the past 15 years, there has been a limited but growing shift toward the provision of higher education for refugees, with involvement by various governments, universities, international nongovernmental organizations, and refugee communities. Historically, access for refugees who have not been resettled has been granted through highly competitive scholarship initiatives such as the UNHCR’s DAFI Tertiary Scholarship Program or the World University Services of Canada’s (WUSC) Student Refugee Program. Pedagogic and technological shifts catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in greater access to connected tertiary learning programs in protracted refugee situations (UNHCR, 2023). There also has been a push for microcredentials or alternative credentialing for refugees versus degrees (Loo, 2020; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2023).

Given an increased commitment to refugee educational access across levels, a robust body of scholarship has examined refugee youth aspirations amid “unknowable future[s]” (Dryden-Peterson, 2017, p. 21; see also, e.g., Aden et al., 2023; Bellino, 2018; Burde & King, 2023). Education, broadly speaking, can foster “cognitive . . . if not physical, mobility” (Dryden-Peterson, 2017, p. 22) and the “capacity to aspire” for new futures (Appadurai, 2004). Schooling provides young people with a sense of normalcy (Dryden-Peterson, 2017), access to diasporic networks (Duri & Ibrahim, 2020), an opportunity to reconstitute personhood and social status (Morrice, 2010), and, for some, a pathway to livelihood (Jacobsen, 2019).

Empirical studies on refugee higher education, specifically, emphasize the challenges refugees face in accessing and experiencing university, particularly in countries of resettlement such as the United States and the United Kingdom(e.g., Morrice, 2010; Ramsay & Baker, 2019; Stevenson & Willott, 2007). Refugees must adapt to the host country’s social, political, and economic systems; academic language and content that is not reflective of Indigenous teachings/belief systems; and university financing requirements that often mischaracterize refugees as international students, levying higher fees (Arar, 2021; Arar et al., 2022; Finatto et al., 2022; Kanno & Verghese, 2010; Streitwieser et al., 2019). Less attention has been paid, however, to higher education in protracted refugee situations or contexts where at least 25,000 people from one country remain in exile for 5 years or more. Yet, the United Nations estimates that those in protracted contexts include ~78% of displaced people, most of whom lack resettlement pathways (Ramsay & Baker, 2019; UNHCR, 2020).

As in basic education, the complexities, uncertainties, and restricted mobility brought on by protracted refugee situations complicate the purposes of higher education. On the one hand, higher education offers space to question and navigate existing barriers and structural inequities in displacement such that refugees can forge new senses of belonging (Villegas & Aberman, 2020). Bishop et al. (2021) found that higher education acted as a “safe ground” for refugee women experiencing domestic and other forms of violence in Kenya’s Kakuma camps (p. 47). For Ibrahim (2024), higher education equipped young women in Dadaab with the skills necessary to advocate for policy reform and promote environmental protection in displacement. Resources, ideas, and technological tools applied through study can be adapted as instruments for collective empowerment, extending learning into the greater community (Dahya et al., 2019). University education can position graduates with the confidence and credentials to rebuild the institutional infrastructure of post-conflict nations upon repatriation (Leomoi et al., 2019; TRSN, 2019). And tertiary programming can build solidarity across ethnic, religious, and gender differences (Bishop et al., 2021; Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium [CLCC], 2017). Nonetheless, given the reality of futures circumscribed by both regional and camp-based containment, as well as increasingly tenuous policy landscapes in contexts of third-country resettlement, refugees are limited in how they can contribute to sustainable local development and participate in higher education (Brøndum, 2025; Massa, 2023; Poole & Riggan, 2020; Stevenson & Willott, 2007; Zeus, 2011).

Finally, although higher education for refugees includes undergraduate and postgraduate programming, existing scholarship largely concerns undergraduate education (Clark & Lenette, 2020; Stevenson & Willott, 2007). A very small body of literature focused on countries of resettlement has explored refugee and asylum-seeker students’ desires to pursue postgraduate education (Clark & Lenette, 2020), highly educated refugee student experiences and struggles for belonging in graduate programming (Morrice, 2010; Student et al., 2017), structural barriers to refugee-background students accessing postgraduate education (Naylor et al., 2021), and the impacts of postgraduate education on economic outcomes of refugees (Olsson et al., 2023). To our knowledge, no empirical studies have examined refugee experiences of postgraduate programming in camp contexts. To understand refugee sensemaking around postgraduate education amid protracted refugee situations, we drew on theorization about refugee temporalities and agency in waiting (Brun, 2015; Griffiths, 2014; Massa, 2023).

Refugee Temporalities and Agency in Waiting

Poole and Riggan (2020) argued that in the protracted limbo of camps, refugees face “time emptied of telos” (p. 412). Refugees educated in camp schools, for instance, find themselves stuck at the cusp of different futures than they were led to imagine through educational and humanitarian discourses. As an inherently teleologic institution, schooling thus can represent a form of violence (Poole & Riggan, 2020; see also Valentin, 2014). In her Kakuma, Kenya–based study, Bellino (2018) described how uncertainty borne out protracted displacement for refugees intersects with more general experiences of “waithood” (Honwana, 2013, cited in Bellino, 2018, p. 542), or the liminal space between child and adulthood experienced by youth unable to access sustainable futures after schooling. Bellino’s (2018) findings echo a rich anthropological literature tracing how young people navigate a broken pipeline of opportunity as they complete secondary school in migrant and nonmigrant settings alike (e.g., Jeffrey, 2008; Mains, 2012).

For Massa (2023), university education can offer migrants a means to “improve and fill up the present time” (Massa, 2023, p. 707). Drawing on ethnographic work with Eritrean refugees in Mekele, Ethiopia, she argued that rather than a future-focused project, higher education fosters in refugees “an active disposition towards both the present and the distant future” (Massa, 2023, p. 698). Massa (2023) built on Brun’s (2015) analytic frame of agency in waiting to describe the myriad ways in which refugees make meaningful their time in spatial and temporal liminality. She called on scholars to reconceptualize the connections between waiting and future making and illuminate refugees’ efforts to improve their lives through a range of creative strategies.

We therefore explored BHER alumni experiences of postgraduate education in Dadaab from this frame: as a form of agency in waiting not only geared toward future making, but also to make meaningful the present. Attention to refugees’ agency in waiting can help illuminate the disjuncture between official or organizational purposes of higher education and refugees’ uses of it.

Refugee Postgraduate Education: From Coloniality to New Commitments in EiE

In addition to shaping refugees’ experiences navigating protracted displacement, refugee higher education holds unique potential to reshape knowledge making about forced migration (Gatrell et al., 2021; Shivakoti & Milner, 2022) and mitigate a problematic politics of partnership and representation in EiE (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022; Shah et al., 2025). Studies of coloniality in and beyond EiE have demonstrated that Global North actors and institutions still drive policymaking and perpetuate epistemic injustice (Brun & Shuayb, 2024; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Odora Hoppers, 2025; Oddy, 2023). The architecture and implementation of EiE, specifically, reinscribe racist assumptions about who holds expertise, who lacks capacity, and who can benefit from intervention (e.g., Bian, 2022; Menashy & Zakharia, 2023). Critical scholars thus called for a reworking of the politics of knowledge production in forced-migration studies by attending to unequal power relations, centering the diversity of knowledges among communities with lived experience, and moving away from extractivist research in which Global South researchers go inadequately paid, cited, and represented in publication and practice (e.g., Brun & Shuayb, 2024; Chakravarti, 2015; McGrath & Young, 2019).

The BHER graduate education model represents one possible means to reform knowledge production. Graduate programs offer the academic training, credentials, and institutional pathways that could facilitate meaningful participation in both research and humanitarian intervention. BHER alumni already contribute to what Mbembe (2016) called “diasporic knowledge networks” among African scholars across locations (p. 14). And they can help forge new purposes for refugee education that reflect its liberatory potential (see Brun & Shuayb, 2024).

Yet, BHER students accessed postgraduate learning in a Canadian institution, which by its very nature prioritizes hegemonic Western onto-epistemologies (Mbembe, 2016; Wright & Xiao, 2021; see also Koyama & Turan, 2023). Formal education, often assimilationist in nature, risks suppressing refugee ways of being and knowing (Koyama & Turan, 2024, p. 3). The BHER graduate model, in its geospatial framing of Canada (and Canadian professors) as teacher and refugees as pupil is limited in its redress of these deeper epistemic injustices (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1986, in Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, p. 6).

For these reasons, graduate education for refugees offers an opportunity to consider what Koyama and Turan (2024, p. 13) described as “the precarious tensions between inclusion and coloniality.” We turn now to explore these tensions in the specific context of Dadaab.

Context

Located only 78 km from the border with Somalia, Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps host 419,155 refugees and asylum seekers from Somalia and across the region (UNHCR Kenya, 2025). Since their establishment in 1991, the camps have seen two-plus generations grow up with severe restrictions on movement, economic activity, and citizenship rights (Aden et al., 2023). In that time, the UNHCR and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have run schools that are parallel to, but separate from, the Kenyan educational system. Educational access has expanded dramatically in the 35 years of Dadaab’s operation, including through private schooling, but it remains inequitable. Although 57% of Dadaab’s population are children, only 27% are enrolled (UNHCR Kenya, 2022). School quality and gender equity remain compromised at all levels (Gomez et al., 2024). Access to postsecondary education in particular is constrained by intersecting barriers including remote location, economic deprivation, gender bias, and colonial legacies (Bhabha et al., 2020). As of 2024, only 2% of university-eligible refugees from Dadaab attended any form of higher education (Gomez et al., 2024).

Refugees both in and outside of school face a range of other challenges, including drastically reduced international funding for food and other essential services, the deleterious effects of climate change and deforestation on the region, and the as-yet-elusive promises of local integration. ² Somali refugees in particular are scapegoated by politicians and the media as a threat to Kenyan public safety (Jaji, 2014). Kenya has repeatedly promised to close the Dadaab camps despite the UNHCR’s official policy against forcible repatriation. For the past decade, the UNHCR has instead advocated for location integration, or the absorption of refugees into national systems, as the preferred durable solution (Dryden-Peterson et al., 2019). In 2021, Kenya passed a new Refugees Act that aimed to better integrate refugees into Kenyan society and schools while altering international funding mechanisms (Refugees Act, 2021). The 2024 Shirika Plan offered a blueprint for implementing the Refugees Act (Republic of Kenya, 2025). As of 2025, however, refugees who finished school continued to face limited options: They could repatriate to home countries or move elsewhere in the region, engage in poorly compensated incentive work for a dwindling number of agencies inside the camps, create new livelihood possibilities through private enterprise, or await fulfillment of the promises of the Refugees Act.

The BHER Project began in 2010 to respond to Kenyan and refugee stakeholder requests to improve educational quality in the Dadaab camps and adjacent host communities through the provision of accredited tertiary programs to untrained teachers. At that time, postsecondary opportunities were severely restricted, with funders preferring lifesaving interventions over higher education (Dryden-Peterson & Giles, 2010). The scholarship programs that did exist favored top-performing younger students and men. They also removed students from the camps and relocated them to major Kenyan cities or abroad.

As a consortium of universities and nongovernmental organizations, BHER worked to make postsecondary programming accessible to refugee and underserved local communities in Dadaab. ³ Between 2012 and 2022, it enrolled more than 400 students in various postsecondary certificate, diploma, and degree-granting programs. By 2022, 126 students had completed undergraduate degrees from York University, Kenyatta University, or Moi University from the camps. In 2016–17, BHER students who completed their undergraduate degrees lobbied for access to graduate study. In 2018, BHER launched its MEd program, and by 2024, 18 men and 10 women had completed a research-intensive MEd degree from Toronto’s York University while remaining in Dadaab. ⁴ BHER MEd alumni have diverse intersectional identities. They hail from Somalia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda and range in age from 25 to 60 years. Many are parents, but others live alone while playing key leadership roles in their communities.

BHER MEd alumni have relocated to take up positions in international organizations (e.g., UNHCR protection, UNICEF, UN logistics, etc.) and education (e.g., school management and NGOs) across East Africa and the Horn. Little is known, however, about student experiences in postgraduate programming, how access to graduate study shaped their personal and professional trajectories, or how they interpret the efficacy of graduate education in shifting modes of power and epistemic privilege.

Methods

This study was part of a broader collaborative autoethnographic project conducted by a transnational coauthor team that explored the possibilities of postgraduate education for refugees while examining North–South partnership dynamics in EiE. Our research team included Rachel Silver, a U.S.-born faculty member of a Canadian higher educational institution; HaEun Kim and Riya Bhatla, two Canada-based graduate students with backgrounds in East and South Asia; and Sahra Mohamed Ismail and Mark Okello Oyat, two BHER alumni from different East African countries with lived experiences as refugees in Kenya. Four of us had previously collaborated through BHER and a subsequent research project. ⁵ Given our diverse intersectional identities and institutional locations, we set out to consider the research questions explored in this article while at the same time critically examining the knowledge production politics of our joint efforts to navigate hierarchical academic and funding structures . Collaborative autoethnographic findings, which braid together collective analysis of the distinct, yet shared experiences of a phenomenon (Adams et al., 2014; Chang, 2021; Lapadat, 2017)—here, the research project itself—fall beyond the scope of this paper. We focus instead on empirical data generated through semi-structured interviews with BHER MEd alumni in Kenya and Somalia. These interviews explored alumni experiences in postgraduate programming, life trajectories after MEd completion, and the role of research training in fostering localized knowledge production and leadership.

Data Generation

Data generation took place through in-person and online interviews, depending on participant location and availability, during the spring and summer of 2023. All 28 BHER MEd alumni were invited to take part in the study, of whom 22, including coauthors Sahra Mohamed Ismail and Mark Okello Oyat, were available and agreed. We reached out to all potential participants via WhatsApp Messanger, phone, or email. Sahra Mohamed Ismail and Mark Okello Oyat then interviewed available participants in person in Dadaab and Nairobi, while Canada-based team members Rachel Silver, HaEun Kim, and Riya Bhatla conducted online interviews via Zoom with participants in other parts of Kenya and Somalia. Team discussions around our positionalities (i.e., gender, age, institutional titles, and geographic locations) within the project led to strategic outreach and assigning of interviewees.

To ensure meaningful conversations, we developed an initial interview protocol in late 2022 that was used for pilot interviews in January 2023. Open-ended questions focused on participants’ reflections on their experiences of and purposes for postgraduate study, as well as on their research engagement and/or desires after completing their studies. Initial interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 1½ hours. As a research team, we then met online to hone our pilot protocol and strategize about who would conduct which interviews and how (e.g., Zoom or in person). All interviews occurred in English by choice of both the research team and participants.

Data Analysis

At the end of 2023, the research team convened for a week-long, in-person meeting in Nairobi to begin data analysis . After a year of working online, face-to-face collaboration was needed to improve communication and team cohesion. Once our week-long data-analysis workshop had concluded, we transitioned back online, continuing analysis over Zoom, email, and WhatsApp.

To prepare for our Nairobi retreat, we transcribed and uploaded all interview data to qualitative analysis software AtlasTI. Once together, we engaged notions of refugee temporalities, agency in waiting, and coloniality from the literature to frame our team’s discussions and create an initial list of deductive codes. These codes included “im/mobilities,”“livelihoods,”“diaspora,”“stuck” or “waiting,” and “politics of knowledge production.”

Subsequently, we conducted multiple coding rounds on each interview transcript. Four members of the authorship team of five (RS, HEK, SMI, and MOO) sat together while individually coding interviews and identifying inductive codes. Each team member chose whether to do this initial coding round in AtlasTI or manually.

After completing a thorough, simultaneous read of each interview, we pooled codes and discussed emerging themes. By finishing all 22 interviews this way, we refined our codebook, added it to AtlasTI, and then re-coded all transcripts synchronously on separate devices using this final list. Further coding rounds allowed us to map patterns in our data and highlight disconfirming evidence. Disconfirming evidence, such as when participants questioned the value of higher education, allowed us to refine codes and nuance our findings. Throughout, we developed analytic memos to expand on emerging themes (Emerson et al., 2011). Some memos detailed our in-person conversations. Others were written individually and shared. Analytic memos were recorded in AtlasTI. Saturation was reached when thematic findings echoed across multiple participants’ interviews and were considered in relation to disconfirming evidence (e.g., Saldaña, 2021).

Throughout, the autoethnographic nature of our overall study allowed us to discuss how context, histories, positionalities, and relationships to the BHER Project shaped the different lenses through which we engaged our findings. Having Sahra Mohamed Ismail and Mark Okello Oyat as both research team members and participants made data generation and analysis iterative and inclusive of two distinct emic perspectives.

Although we collaborated on research design, data generation, and analysis as a team, once analysis was completed, Sahra Mohamed Ismail and Mark Okello Oyat asked the other authors to sketch out the first draft of the paper. This reflected our different interests in and capacity to devote time to writing. It also reveals the limitations of norms around academic English in scholarly publications. In the fall of 2024, the Canada-based authors circulated an outline that synthesized codes and key quotations, organized under central themes and findings for team review. Then, after receiving revisions on our submitted article in the summer of 2025, we again met in person in Nairobi to strategize responses. Our hybrid, multistaged collaborative approach to data collection, analysis, writing, and revision ensured ample opportunities for data validation and triangulation across transnational lines.

Ethical Considerations and Limitations

This study engaged a purposefully nonrepresentative sample of refugee postgraduates given that our pool of potential participants was small by default. Complete participant anonymity was unfeasible because interview participants were previously known to members of the research team. Additionally, the inclusion of both program alumni and former staff on the research team, while enhancing familiarity and trust given long-standing relationships (see, e.g., Tobin & Hayashi, 2017), inevitably shaped the nature of the data collected.

Our project is guided by the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration’s International Code of Ethics (IASFM, 2018), which takes both power differentials and refugee agency seriously, as well as literature on the ethics of refugee research (e.g., Clark-Kazak, 2017; Daley, 2021). ⁶ We emphasized during recruitment, data generation, and beyond that alumni were not obligated to participate and that they could withdraw at any time. When we conducted this research, BHER programming had concluded due to funding constraints. MEd alumni, who had completed all previously available offerings, were aware of this.

Constraints related to Zoom and long-distance interviewing, while mitigated to the best of our abilities, also meant some limitations in communication during data collection. For instance, we lost connectivity during multiple Zoom calls, requiring patience, a willingness to reschedule, and, on one occasion, the loss of a full transcript recording. Again, our prior face-to-face rapport with participants and multichannel communications (i.e., phone calls, WhatsApp/SMS, and local contacts) prompted reciprocal efforts to complete interviews. Finally, despite our goal to name and reflect together on the often-problematic nature of a North–South research partnership through collaborative autoethnography, we found ourselves subject to many of the same power-infused dynamics that we critique. Although some stages of our research were truly collaborative, others produced transnational divisions of labor, particularly, as noted, around academic English and fluency in specific writing conventions that marginalize nondominant linguistic and knowledge traditions. ⁷ Decisions around authorship ordering changed across writing projects and reflected multiple forms of contribution. Together we worked to ameliorate some key problematics in the relational aspects of research while certainly falling short of broader structural transformation. A more comprehensive analysis of positionality, particularly regarding institutional dynamics and North–South knowledge hierarchies, falls beyond the scope of this paper.

Key Findings

Conversations with BHER alumni focused on three overlapping areas: experiences in and trajectories beyond the program, sensemaking around the purposes of graduate education, and consideration of enduring systemic constraints. Overall, participants in our study echoed Dryden-Peterson and Giles’ (2010) observation that higher education can, in fact, represent a “process of change” and enhance the ability to make meaningful life choices (p. 5). While the realities of life in Dadaab remain highly circumscribed by containment policy and diminished resources, participants in our study demonstrated how master’s credentials shaped their senses of self. Postgraduate education fostered increased global connectivity, gendered social change, new possibilities for economic sustainability, and, for some, physical movement. The findings that follow emphasize these openings and closures, demonstrating how postgraduate education represented either a form of agency in waiting or an end to waithood.

Personal Development and Cognitive Mobilities

Because when you have [a] Master’s degree], you have a lot of things. You are somebody who can stand his or herself alone. —Halima ⁸

In interviews, respondents described a host of personal qualities and skills they attributed to postgraduate education. Specific skills included how to “become even patient” and problem solve through dialogue (Yusuf); “analyze text, and how to go read . . . beyond the text” (Yusuf); “write and negotiate” (Hanan); “be self-reliant, today and in the future” (Mariam); “see things through a well . . . filtered lens” (Juma); “think out of the box” (Halima); “control himself or herself” (Halima); and be “moderate . . . not to shout, not to fight with others, not to quarrel without a reason” (Sadia). Personal development fostered through the degree thus comprised not only a cluster of professional skills, but also new means of engagement in life beyond academia. Hakim explained how his postgraduate training sparked confidence: “When you acquire a graduate certificate,” he explained, “It will develop you as a person and as an individual. It also makes you [have] the cognitive ability to believe in yourself” (emphasis added).

The idea that graduate credentialing fomented self-confidence echoed across conversations. As Mosi explained: “Now I am able, or I can be able, to meet people, . . . and people cannot look down at me. Because now I am on a level that I can speak to others and express myself and I can . . . give my views to others and to be the mouth of others.” The abilities to be heard and to lead were significant both within refugee communities and in humanitarian spaces where refugees have been historically sidelined as policy actors. For these reasons, refugee alumni appreciated the status that postgraduate degrees afforded. While this status was certainly social, it also was about having their expertise taken seriously amid the precarity and “trappedness” of protracted displacement.

Saleem talked about now being “a respected person in the community,” whereas Yusuf shared that graduate education “gave me enough airflow, but in knowledge, skills, and experiences, to become a very professional person in my society . . . to be actually consulted.” Finally, according to Mariam:

The Master[s] program is something that made me a person, because before, I never knew [the] ways to write [a major research paper]. . . . And I can also be a speaker because I’m brave to air out the situation that happens in my surroundings, or anywhere else. So, it’s changed my life from the position where I was. Now I’m somewhere [emphasis added].

Miriam’s description of how graduate programming made her a person moved beyond instrumentalization of education as a means to change her socioeconomic or geographic reality to something intrinsic. In other words, rather than shift what she did, it shifted how she was. While the social and cultural significance of schooling has been well documented (e.g., Levinson et al., 1996), in protracted refugee situations, emphasis has been placed on teleology—that is, how formal education is future oriented—about becoming more than being (Poole & Riggan, 2020). Yet, for many of our participants, self-actualization through graduate education was a temporally present phenomenon—that is, significant in the moment. Even more, Mariam’s statement that “now” she was “somewhere” demonstrates that mobility might not require future movement. She had already arrived “somewhere” while still in Dadaab. As Halima similarly noted, “Before it was like I was not even knowing where to go . . . and what to do. But now I can fit everywhere, and I can be a responsible person who can lift very many people” (emphasis added).

Both women’s phrasings blended geospatial and temporal mobilities. And for both, the need for movement, if still limited by refugee management systems, was at least partially mitigated by having achieved new ways of being. Mosi captured this complexity when he explained: “I hope to get a better life, not being a refugee forever, because . . . the knowledge I got made me free. Yes, I’m free of mind, though I’m a refugee.” Mosi had already gained freedom, despite his enduring hope that, at some future point, he could overcome the very real constraints of refugee camp life. Indeed, Brun (2015) noted how notions of hope transform and take on new interpretations among those waiting in protracted displacement. Postgraduate education, far from solely a requisite tool for a different future, was a form of opening, expansion, and even relief. This relief as an affective experience is distinct from agency as a form of doing, although it may produce or dovetail with it.

Gendered Leadership and Social Change

For Aisha, Mariam, and Halima, however, newfound senses of self-confidence gained through the MEd related not only to being refugees, but also to being women. Many participants discursively linked postgraduate education to gendered social change (see also Buck & Silver, 2013). Economic, sociocultural, and structural factors—including responsibility for caregiving, firewood collecting, cleaning, and food preparation; restrictions on movement; and expectations for marriage—have long meant that girls and women in the Dadaab context accessed and completed schooling at lower rates (e.g., Dagane & Yussuf Aden, 2021; World University Services of Canada [WUSC], 2023). Yet, the 10 female graduates of the BHER MEd program demonstrated how women could still attend and succeed in graduate school despite significant family obligations.

Women who completed their MEds emphasized that graduate training fostered novel forms of leadership within their families and communities. Sadia explained that her choice of research project enabled a newfound sense of independence, allowing her to support women and mothers struggling with domestic abuse in the camps. She explained, “I’m in a position to settle minds and even to advise my neighbors, even my siblings.” Aisha noted that despite “no change” in her salary, “the community speaks to me as somebody who has education.” Leadership opportunities, particularly for women, became new instantiations of agency in waiting and a fresh opportunity to shape camp life. Significantly, women alumni framed the contributions garnered through higher education as having generational value in and beyond the family unit. As Hanan shared, “a mother is the first teacher.” Hanan’s assertion illuminates how access to graduate education provided a chance to show young people, including daughters and their peers, about women’s potential to lead in and beyond the family.

Halima similarly described how postgraduate training shaped her role as a mother and wife : “[Higher education] gives me a leadership opportunity because I’m the leader of the family. The family respect[s] me because they see [me] as somebody who can change the lives of many people. . . . And I think that is a huge honor to me.” Through mothering, mentorship, and engagement in leadership roles within and beyond the home, Hanan and Halima enacted new ways of being that were not constrained by their current circumstances. According to Brun (2015), when future time is severed from the present every day, agency in waiting cannot be realized. For BHER MEd graduate women alumni, however, feelings of “stuckness” or “waithood” were at least partially mitigated by the new forms of gendered agency, including new ways of being in the temporal present that felt meaningful in shaping collective futures.

Finally, women and men alike described using graduate school to craft fluid senses of belonging across local and global scales. For some, the combination of virtual learning with classmates in Toronto, Canada and Nairobi, Kenya helped foster transnational connections despite camp confinement. Men and women alike talked about fostering global sensibilities through reading, writing, publishing, and presenting. Isaac described himself as a “global citizen,” whereas Halima said that she “can just call [her]self an international person.” This mattered especially for young women, whose physical travel was restricted by their refugee status, familial responsibilities, and gendered social norms around movement and travel.

Physical and Professional Pathways from the MEd

Whereas all students talked about transformed senses of self, some alumni shared stories of transformed pathways after the MEd. Here master’s degrees were seen to catalyze physical movement—something that “can lead me out of the camps” (Mohamed) via formal employment in one’s home country. Indeed, Mohamed, who had already repatriated, shared that he had spent almost 30 years in Dadaab before feeling well enough situated, via graduate training, to return to Somalia with possibilities for a stable income. Alumni such as Mohamed sought employment in the Ministries of Education of their home countries, in UN offices, or with international nongovernmental organizations. Even alumni who had not yet left Dadaab clearly articulated a link between their advanced-degree credentials and a newly viable pathway back home. According to Farah:

You know, right now, if I go to Somalia, I can be a Minister for Education since I have a master’s in education. I can now implement a program, I can research, I can be an officer [or] research practitioner, I have that qualification right now.

For Farah, the difference between repatriating with options and remaining stuck was the degree and related qualifications . Still, although the idea of repatriating with the credentials gained in Dadaab came up often in conversation, it didn’t necessarily mean an immediate or even unidirectional move back. Instead, alumni made careful decisions related to safety, political stability, and family needs. Many chose to split their families—with children and spouses, for instance, remaining in Dadaab for its educational opportunities—while they themselves went to work in Somalia. These decisions were again gendered and, in many cases, involved the male migrating alone. Married men with families often relied on their wives to remain with the children to continue attending schools in the camps, which were seen as more stable and of higher quality. Both female and male alumni did migrate to Somalia and other regions, but an examination of post-MEd geographic pathways revealed that for women, relocation out of the camps was most feasible for if single and not yet a parent or, less frequently, with a supportive spouse.

For participants who remained in Dadaab, future pathways to economic stability were both opened and foreclosed. Although refugees who were able to attend higher or even secondary education have long assumed positions as teachers and incentive workers for NGOs, opportunities for growth and even survivability within these positions have been constrained by the UNHCR’s harmonization policy, which limits the compensation of refugees formally employed within Dadaab relative to that of Kenyan nationals. Female refugees in particular faced enduring barriers to employment in Dadaab, even after postgraduate learning (Radio Ergo, 2025). Aisha explained, “After I completed my research and also graduated, I’m still jobless.” Or, as Sadia noted, “after I did the [MEd] program, I’m really in the same position with [employment]. It hasn’t really changed anything.” Aid austerity also has meant a downturn in the camp economy, with significantly fewer positions available. Some participants shared how they chose to hide their MEd degrees on job applications for fear of appearing overqualified and/or intimidating nonrefugee employers. Thus, despite new knowledge, status, capacities, and credentials, for several alumni (especially females), professional pathways and growth remained constrained by larger refugee regulatory regimes and gendered social structures.

Still other alumni who remained in Dadaab leveraged their status, skills, and networks to create new or supplementary livelihood opportunities in private schools or businesses. Together these possibilities represented a means to “sustain themselves . . . and the community” (Yusuf). Participants also spoke of their research skills as newly marketable, particularly in their ability to represent local perspectives in externally funded contracts. During the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, foreign organizations that might have collected data themselves sought to hire local researchers for data collection and knowledge dissemination. As Juma noted, “You know, when we completed our studies, the only thing that we could sell was our research, our researcher skills.” Alumni spoke of how useful research skills proved to be in job interviews, where they could offer potential employers not only teaching expertise from existing careers but also the ability to monitor and evaluate programs or conduct community-based research.

Thus, to some extent, higher education reshaped refugees’ possibilities for geospatial and social mobility. Isaac explained that “being in a refugee camp was not [my] choice.” Even still, engaging in graduate education enabled new possibilities for choice making around where to live, where to work, and where to raise one’s family. Often these choices changed as contracts or opportunities came and went. For some, the sense of opening through postgraduate education was significant enough to mitigate buufis, or the powerful desire for third-country resettlement that Cindy Horst (2006) described in her ethnography of Dadaab 20 years ago. As Hussein, who repatriated to Somalia to work, noted:

The master’s program really has significantly changed my life. And before I was just a man living in a refugee setting and always attached his head to resettlement, saying if I don’t get resettlement, I will not move forward. But after the research, now I was thinking outside the box. I didn’t put myself in a small box. I am really helping now my community; I am giving back to my community [emphasis added].

Third-country resettlement has become nearly impossible for refugees such as Hussein due to the tightening of quotas across the board in the Global North as well as specific policies that target Somalis, such as Trump’s visa freeze on particular foreign nationals (U.S. Department of State, 2026). It is thus hugely significant that, for Hussein, postgraduate education obtained in Dadaab allowed him to let go of resettlement dreams and craft new ideas for a future grounded in the East African region. No longer “just a man . . . attached . . . to resettlement,” Hussein expanded the “box” he felt constrained by and forged new possibilities for himself.

Still, however, for others, the limitations of UNHCR and Kenyan government policy, bordering regimes, hiring norms, and caregiving responsibilities meant that opportunities to transform one’s livelihood or location continued to feel constrained, even after postgraduate education. These experiences were gendered. Despite meaningful cognitive mobilities, both women and men continued to find themselves stuck at the cusp of different futures from those traditionally promised by educational discourses.

Individual Trajectories, Collective Responsibility

Although the MEd program fostered new opportunities for physical mobility for some and new livelihood possibilities for many, nearly all graduates spoke of new forms of becoming. Crucially, none of these new pathways, enacted or still aspirational, were described in individual terms. Rather, individual trajectories were conceptualized as pathways to make change for families and communities. Agency in waiting, for BHER alumni, was collectivized. We have already seen how female participants described the impacts of their leadership as rippling out generationally. Others described the purpose of education in terms of community uplift. Isaac, for instance, shared how in his Master’s program application, he had described wanting to improve the lives of his community members. Years later, Isaac felt prepared to implement a cascade of transformation. He reflected: “I can’t learn and get this knowledge, and you know, leave with it. . . . Besides helping my community, I wanted also to help my . . . family members. Because I can get work. . . . That is payment. . . . And of course, I love my country.”

Like Isaac, other alumni saw repatriation specifically as enabling a means to support themselves and their families and as central to nation-building agendas. As Omar explained: “I decided to look for these opportunities in Somalia, because I knew in Kenya, I would not get this opportunity. So, I leave all my family behind. . . . I had to come and participate in the rebuilding of the nation.” Similarly, Awale shared that his postgraduation plan was to “go back to my country one day and take part in its rebuilding, in terms of education, in terms of livelihoods, in terms of economy, in terms of political stability, in terms of spreading peace within my country and also, on the continent at large.” Isaac, Omar, and Awale collapsed scale—and temporalities—in their descriptions of intended impact such that to care for one’s family was constitutive of caring for one’s community and, by extension, nation. It might involve leaving one’s family (see Oliveira, 2017).

Specific projects alumni engaged with, or hoped to engage with, included redesigning or evaluating the Somali national curriculum, bringing sustainability initiatives to their home country, running in local elections, or teaching. Asma, a female returnee who, at the time of our interview, worked on schooling projects in Somalia, explained that she was proud to both support young people who hadn’t had access to education and represent Somali women as a leader in the community. Another returnee was an aspiring politician who hoped to seek a political career to “restore dignity” to both Dadaab refugees and Somali communities (Hussein). He was one of several alumni who saw their graduate degrees as giving them a platform from which to work to transform conditions on both sides of the border.

In Dadaab, five alumni came together in 2020 to form Kenya’s first formally incorporated refugee-led organization, the Dadaab Response Association (DRA). ⁹ The DRA offered MEd graduates a chance to “sustain ourselves and also make a difference in our community” (Juma). In their efforts to produce high-quality, locally driven research, DRA members applied for their own research grants from funders while advertising themselves as local consultants whose expertise, skills, and proximity to diverse refugee communities were for hire. Throughout, they emphasized the transformative potential of localized inquiry and solution making. As Juma explained, “We think of local solutions, localization is the most important thing. . . . our vision is to create a peaceful and a vibrant community that lives in diversity. For cultural and social-economic inclusion, empowerment, and independence for their mutual benefits and development.”

The DRA enhanced community ties while providing graduates with the opportunity to apply for direct funding to do work about which they were deeply passionate. By collectivizing, DRA members also avoided competing against each other for opportunities. The DRA sought 40% female representation in their core board members while mentoring and supporting other female-led community-based organizations in Dadaab (DRA, 2025). As they forged new opportunities to sustain themselves, they articulated the inextricable link between livelihoods and community uplift.

Thus, the outcomes of higher education for individuals intersected with collective ones, and opportunities for individual mobility through education were understood as communal efforts. Perhaps most notably, research itself was theorized exclusively in communitarian terms. This collectivization of higher education’s impact differs from literature that emphasizes education’s role in fostering individual agency in waiting (e.g., Massa, 2023). Indeed, research on refugee temporalities has focused on individual sensemaking and experiences and the ways in which these intersect with individual aspirations. BHER alumni’s emphasis on collectivity offers a new frame through which to consider temporalities as they relate to educational programming.

“I’m the Change Agent”: Research as a Tool for Localized Social Transformation

Across our interviews, the purposes of research and, by extension, graduate education were broadly conceptualized as in service of mobilizing the community to enact social change. Research conducted by graduate students aimed to investigate, increase awareness, and drive practical solutions for community-based problems. Participants’ research focused on topics of immediate concern, including climate change, girls’ school retention and enrollment rates, female genital cutting, corporal punishment, youth suicide, orphans, inclusive education, mental health and counseling, and digital literacy for women and girls. There was a common understanding that research skills could be harnessed to develop meaningful localized interventions and solutions. Insider ideas, as Omar noted, “are fresh, they are organic, if I may say, and they need to be discussed.”

As Mariam explained, “Graduate education . . . [is] something that I can make the community change, and I’m the change agent.” Or, put another way: “Research is for finding things that other people cannot see” (Mosi). Mosi and others used metaphors of lenses, filters, and vision to demonstrate how, with research skills, they were able to offer clear vantagepoints on enduring problems. At the same time, research offered novel opportunities for lesser-heard voices, such as refugees, broadly, or refugee women, to “be heard or seen” (Sadia). These understandings, gleaned from refugees’ lived experiences, offered a counterpoint to most research on Dadaab, which has been conducted by outsiders and often misaligned with questions asked by community members. As Kasim explained: “If my experience is anything to go by, over the last few years in Dadaab, the people who are coming for research are completely strangers. They are just from outside.” In other words, for BHER alumni, research training positioned them to mitigate the transnational division of research labor that they had experienced historically and forge alternatives to some of the more colonial and extractive data-collection practices.

Alumni contrasted externally organized and local research, with the former “rely[ing] on second-hand information” (Mohamed) or necessarily filtered through mediating organizations like the UNHCR, with the latter more ethical and accurate. Alumni shared in their interviews that they then disseminated their work across their own personal and professional networks. The BHER Project included an in-person research symposium, and many participants circulated their writing with colleagues via WhatsApp. Others took their findings directly to teachers in Dadaab schools as well as local NGO partners in Somalia (e.g., Mohamed, Yusuf, and Hussein).

Nevertheless, the benefits of refugee-led research extended beyond Dadaab as refugee scholars increasingly gained access to the kinds of global policymaking forums from which they had previously been excluded. Refugees, as Isaac noted, had been “lacking [the] right to participate in policy generation forums because of their status.” He continued to describe conversations with direct policy implications for refugee lives: “We are interested, and we need to be heard. So, my research is a voice for [the] voiceless. . . . That’s why I become a researcher within, so that they’re not ignored anymore.”

Alumni shared experiences of being invited to speak or advocate for refugee education at the Global Refugee Forum or other conferences in Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Canada. Some also cofounded and represent the global Tertiary Refugee Student Network (TRSN, 2019). International participation has only been possible for male alumni thus far, with women engaging in research forums within Kenya. But collectively, since 2018, BHER graduate students have influenced the fields of refugee education and forced-migration studies. They have published more than 25 single- and coauthored articles, working papers, or chapters in edited volumes and regularly disseminate their work at conferences. Publication and presentation opportunities represented, for Sadia, an opportunity to share insight with “any and every person all over the world” regardless of her location. A refugee might be physically constrained, but their ideas could travel far and wide.

Limitations to Research Localization

Still, interviewees faced persistent challenges regarding knowledge production and mobilization. These included difficulties accessing research funding, grants, and travel documents to attend conferences and publishing opportunities; gaining pathways to doctoral education; and navigating the hierarchies that plague both EiE and academia. For one participant, the simple inability to print her major research paper meant that she could not share it with relevant stakeholders, including the UNHCR, which requested a hard copy (Hanan). Alumni described feeling frustrated that lacking resources and social capital, their findings might just “remain in my laptop or my storage” (Mariam). Elsewhere, Silver et al. (2022) described how, despite rhetorical commitments to localized knowledge production in refugee and forced-migration studies, the realities of publication and funding structures—which require strong internet connectivity and often a PhD-level principal investigator, continue to restrict refugee participation. So too do reimbursement models from funders that require a person or organization to pay their expenses and then seek reimbursement (Silver et al., 2022). These limitations left refugees’ writing “stuck” in much the same way as their authors.

Beyond logistical and financial challenges, alumni described entrenched colonial attitudes around who lends expertise and who benefits from knowledge in both academia and humanitarianism (see also Menashy & Zakharia, 2022, 2023). Alumni worked against codified social and professional hierarchies. Yusuf explained, “When it comes to research, it’s a difficult[y] . . . because people actually consider you as just a beneficiary.” He then continued to discuss research-informed practice: “And you will be regarded as [having] benefited, rather than being a partner or . . . actually [a] contributor to the program.” For the DRA, the ineligibility to be a principal investigator (or co-principal investigator) on funding grants meant that the organization remained relegated to the role of consultant, subcontracted implementing partner, or, again, beneficiary. Juma also described how research teams would hire DRA members as individuals versus the organization itself, further undermining their ability to collectivize. Given these challenges, the DRA sought to advocate with global funders to “consider giving money directly to refugees to implement in the field rather than going through maybe NGOs or other partners” (Juma). Concerns around capacity, or a lack thereof, however, have been used to perpetuate existing hierarchies and structures (e.g., Pierre, 2020).

Across interviews, another unifying theme was graduates’ interest in accessing doctoral-level education. ¹⁰ Participants’ desires for the PhD was rooted in the understanding that “education has no limit” and that education translates to more opportunity and a “better life” (Mohamed and Yusuf). The scarcity of accessible, funded PhD programs for refugees limited doctoral-level opportunities and subsequently principal investigator status, principal investigator grants, and other research leadership roles. As Juma succinctly noted: “It doesn’t matter that you have the idea. . . . In general, people look at your academic qualifications. At the end of everything, they will say, ‘What is the academic qualification of this person with this great and good idea?’” (emphasis added). Professional categorizations as well as colonial perceptions of expertise perpetuate limitations to research localization.

BHER alumni’s doctoral aspirations demonstrate the struggle for both recognition and representation in academia and EiE. Structural changes are needed in formal education across levels that move beyond inclusion to more meaningfully decolonize teaching and learning, curricular content, and language use (Koyama & Turan, 2024; Vanyoro, 2024). Yet, participants’ expressions of a desire to advance from an “Emerging Scholar . . . to recognize myself as a Full Scholar” (Kasim), to be professionally acknowledged as “an expert in education” (Omar) and “become one of the providers in the universities” (Asma) cannot be overlooked. There are, to our knowledge, no PhD programs that include options to study from the camps. This doesn’t mean that knowledge stops; refugee alumni’s expertise was channeled through their lives as they continued to work, collaborate, and dream in pursuit of more independent and localized futures. Juma summarized his dream:

I don’t know when or how, but with time, I think we can develop something of our own dream. Our dream organization, where we have the money and we have the idea, we have everything that we can . . . [to] build the way we think that an organization that is led by the refugees in those communities should look like.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article has drawn on semi-structured interviews with alumni of Dadaab’s first in situ MEd program to consider the role and significance of postgraduate education in their lives. In so doing, we have added to a rich literature on refugee higher education what is, to our knowledge, the first empirical study focused on a refugee-camp-based graduate-level degree program. We have paid attention to two broad areas: First, we considered the ways in which access to master’s level coursework and credentials has shaped alumni senses of self and pathways in, and often beyond, Dadaab. Second, we explored if and how postgraduate opportunities might catalyze change in a field of study with a stubbornly colonial politics of knowledge production that continues to position refugees as beneficiaries or research subjects. We have done so as a transnational research team that includes members with and without lived experiences of displacement and whose varied personal, institutional, and geopolitical positionalities result in the same possibilities for and limitations to partnership we consider empirically.

Scholarship on refugee temporalities emphasizes the ambiguity, if not violence, presented by institutionalized schooling for refugees who are left stuck by bordering regimes and sustained political conflict. However, our research, which focused on the very few refugees in Dadaab who gained access to postgraduate education, aligns more closely with Massa’s (2023) emphasis on higher education and agency in waiting (see also Brun, 2015). In our study, not all refugees were stuck waiting. Instead, the credentialing from a master’s program catalyzed new forms of cognitive mobility and even physical movement, such as through repatriation for higher-paying work. This movement, of course, was made possible by geopolitically specific circumstances, such as Dadaab’s proximity to and porousness of the Kenya–Somalia border, and by the fact that families could remain in Dadaab with one person repatriating.

Still, nearly every respondent in our study, who represented the most educationally privileged in the context of Dadaab, described the MEd as a form of opening: of employment opportunities, leadership possibilities, transnational connections, and pathways in the now. This is not to say, however, that they didn’t also remain constrained by stubborn social and systemic boundaries. These included the UNHCR’s harmonization policy, or two-tiered wage structure that sets different payment rates for Kenyan nationals versus refugee workers, as well as the Kenyan government’s approach to refugee management which, until recently, has contained the majority of refugees in remote camps without the right to movement or to labor-market participation.

Constraint was felt particularly acutely by women whose family care responsibilities factored into decision making about movement and who remained in the camps with low earning power. For most of our participants, however, education at this level was as much about being as it was about becoming. A focus on research, personal and professional skills development, and leadership capacities transformed schooling from a teleologic institution geared toward different futures to one about expanding capacities, employed or not, in the temporal present. When futures were evoked, they nearly always related to a desire for collective or generational changes.

Thus, our empirical findings contribute to the literature on refugee temporalities/agency-in-waiting in two distinct ways: first through concerted attention to gender and new ways of being-in-waiting that were not necessarily driven by the concrete goals of physical or even social mobility and, second, by pointing to agency as a collective project. Gender became salient in the fostering of new senses of self and forms of authority within the family and broader community, as well as in means through which different futures were imagined. At the same time, however, pathways were constrained by gendered norms and systems of power across scale. Participants who chose to repatriate tended to be men whose wives remained in Dadaab, or unmarried women. By contrast, married women alumni with families faced narrowest choices for livelihoods post-degrees given both camp policies and care responsibilities. Further research is needed into the marital, class, age, geographic, clan, and other dynamics that intersect with gender to enable or restrict alumni to take risks, including at repatriation. This same constellation of factors also shapes the extent to which refugees can access professional networks to find new formal employment opportunities or the capital to start new businesses.

Still, by paying particular attention to female BHER alumni, whose structural or geographic circumstances did not change after the program, we illuminated how agency in waiting included not only forms of activity or means to fill time, but also new senses of self. Women graduates pointed to new ways of being after having completed the degree that had very little to do with clock time, filling the day, or feeling constrained from—or better able to access—a distinct future. Instead, they repositioned themselves within Dadaab and the temporal present vis-à-vis their own families and communities. This finding helps to justify policy efforts to provide holistic, graduate-level education and degree options that include opportunities to read, critically analyze, and debate ideas as a collective. Such opportunities require more time and resources than microcredentialing or skills-training workshops, but are meaningful in how they frame education not as a means to an end but as an end in itself.

Perhaps most notable in our findings, however, is that for BHER alumni, sensemaking around new pathways and experiences of agency in waiting was collectivized. Every single participant framed the new possibilities they could access—whether the ability to move, global connectivity in research and professional networks, or increased confidence—as significant for their ability to improve the lives of their community members. The purposes of research and, by extension, graduate education were similarly imagined collectively, with research being first and foremost about better understanding of local conditions to ameliorate them in creative, responsive ways.

A collective ethos meant that in their sensemaking and descriptions, participants fused together their goals for family, community, and nation while transposing temporalities from present to future. The overwhelming sense that a person’s education was a collective good served as a counterpoint to individualizing discourses around both education and durable solutions. And the continual foregrounding of the collective over the individual reflected regionally salient onto-epistemologies that emphasized the community over the individual (see, e.g., Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018).

Regarding the politics of knowledge production, refugee-led research described in our study that emerged from the DRA collective or from similar organizations demonstrates the kinds of shifts called for in official localization policies . By crafting research agendas, administering projects that felt ethically sound and relevant, and informing broader policy conversations through their publications and presentations, BHER alumni made knowledge that was contextually responsive and locally informed. They defined their own problems and crafted their own solutions. Without using the language of decoloniality to describe their visioning, they also began to imagine more transformative change.

Still, although the BHER Project included Kenyan universities and presented some opportunities for bringing refugees to existing academic and policy tables, it targeted what Vanyoro (2024) pointed to as the more relational elements of power in knowledge production and not the structural ones. Teaching, learning, and most alumni publications, for instance, were in English, highlighting the often taken-for-granted epistemological and linguistic constructions of academia and EiE. For their part, however, refugees offered visions of changemaking that had little to do with existing academic or humanitarian structures and more to do with a world in which they could move freely, shape the conditions in which they lived, and rethink common ideas from sustainability to integration to gender roles.

Unfortunately, material constraints and hierarchical structures in both academia and the humanitarian industry continue to impede refugee efforts to address deeper barriers that determine how knowledge is produced, validated, and valued. If refugees with research training are only contracted to implement research projects designed externally and cannot access meaningful funding for their own projects, we see a new instantiation of the kinds of transnational divisions of research labor described elsewhere (see, e.g., Chakravarti, 2015). Even when research is codesigned and implemented, academic requirements, such as the use of academic English in scholarly publications, remain barriers to equitable engagement. This project, for instance, failed to overcome many of these intractable challenges. We toggled between prioritizing relationality and navigating the realities of funder requirements as well as academic timelines for publishing, conference submissions, and tenure.

Finally, the DRA’s commitment to collective empowerment was continually impinged by a system designed to channel funding to individuals and specifically individuals with PhDs, institutional affiliations, and citizenship in funding countries. Coloniality in assumptions around the constitution of expertise, as well as in the vocabularies of grant-seeking, grant-making, and migration studies writ large continued to impede refugees, even those able to access elite global spaces. Decolonial and less assimilationist approaches to curriculum, language of instruction, and pedagogy must be explored and funded (Koyama & Turan, 2024). Educational programming for refugees that is not grounded in Western onto-epistemologies is vital, as is a broader dissolution of the systems born from imperialism that produce refugees in the first place and then warehouse them for generations.

Even since conducting this research, much has changed. Bordering regimes are using ever more extreme technologies of control and cruelty. Research and humanitarian funding has eroded dramatically, with the United States freezing and ideologically filtering its commitments. Life in Dadaab has deteriorated. Calls to expand access for refugees to not only basic, but also to university and then postgraduate education seem increasingly aspirational. Still, amid deeply entrenched border imperialism, graduate-level education can produce meaningful openings for individuals and families as well as efforts at collective transformation. These efforts could reshape the region, rebuild post-conflict education systems, and inspire new, yet to be imagined possibilities for practice. And while decoloniality in teaching, learning, and knowledge production politics requires far more than inclusion, higher educational access—right up to the doctoral level—remains a necessary first step.