I received the Edward Guiliano research fellowship in June 2025 to fund the fieldwork expenses of one of my dissertation chapters in Summer 2025. My dissertation examines how African LGBTQ+ asylum seekers experience the U.S. asylum system; exploring their experiences with the U.S. asylum system as a continuum of the persecution previously encountered in their home country due to the U.S. extending the tactics of anti-Black surveillance technologies into its asylum system.  In my application for the Guiliano fellowship, I initially proposed conducting this fieldwork in Los Angeles, California, undertaking ethnographic research with the Black LGBT Migrant Project (BLMP), an NGO supporting African LGBTQ+ immigrants by doing participant observation of three scheduled community meetings and conducting one-hour semi-structured interviews with 12-15 African LGBTQ+ asylum seekers contacted through BLMP. However, given the sensitivity of my research topic around the issue of immigration, detention, deportation, and Blackness, the organization suddenly stopped responding and later temporarily closed down due to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in California and other parts of the country. This caused me to change the fieldwork trajectory of that particular dissertation chapter to Baltimore, Maryland, where I carried out independent research with a collective of African immigrants and asylum seekers whom I largely recruited through snowballing method.

In Baltimore, the focus of my ethnographic fieldwork became primarily centered on understanding the racialization experience of African immigrants and asylum seekers and how they understand, apply, and resist U.S. racial categories and their new signification as “Black.” My main research question in Baltimore became “how do African immigrants and asylum seekers understand and react to their new signification as Black in the U.S. and does this new racial categorization impact the process of asylum, migration, and settling into the U.S.? Given the new trajectory for this chapter, I focused primarily on semi-structured interviews, and I interviewed a total of twenty-three participants whom I contacted through already established relationships with a few friends and the snowballing method. The interviews were majorly conducted on Zoom due to the work schedules of the research participants and their being available mostly at night. Many of the interviews ran from between 30 mins to one hour thirty minutes. Some of the interviews were conducted in-person, and for the ones conducted in-person, I still transcribed and recorded on Zoom. In addition to the qualitative interviews, I did participant observation at few events which included church services, food pantries organized by African churches in Baltimore, schools, grocery stores, and other spaces.  

My choice of Baltimore was originally influenced by the city’s high Black population and the history behind this, especially given its role as a slave state, its large community of Black people pre- Civil war, the City being one of the popular sites for crackdown during the war on drug era, and Maryland’s status as a sanctuary state. My findings from the fieldwork were very insightful and have great potentials in contributing to ongoing research on migration and racialization, especially considering that literature on migration and racialization have not included perspectives on African immigrants post-2000s and in this age of ICE raids. I found that African immigrants and asylum seekers choose Baltimore as a destination city due to Maryland’s sanctuary status and the perception that they would be protected from anti-immigrant crackdown in Baltimore. They believe that residing in the midst of many other Black people who are citizens and U.S. born Blacks would protect them was well attested to by participants. However, living in Baltimore also came with its own challenges in terms of having to contend with systemic racism evident in very poor school ratings, extreme surveillance at places such as grocery stores, lack of good paying jobs with care jobs being the most readily available for immigrants and asylum seekers, and extreme cases of Black on Black violence with U.S. born Black populations who increasingly discriminate against African immigrants and asylum seekers.

 I am already in the process of analyzing the results from this part of my dissertation fieldwork and I intend to submit the chapter produced from this to the Journal of Race and Ethnic Studies.

My immense gratitude goes to the Edward Guiliano Fellowship board for the consideration given to my project and for funding this fieldwork. The fellowship has provided me with the golden opportunity of being able to carry out this critical component of my dissertation fieldwork and a huge prospect of turning the findings from the fieldwork into publishable journal articles, allowing for me to make valuable contribution to the academic community.