Dr Emma Hill
RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow, May 2023 - March 2024
Home Institution: University of St Andrews
Dr Emma Hill is a Race.ED Visiting Archival Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and a Teaching Associate at the University of Strathclyde. She has previously held Research Fellowships at (1) the University of St Andrews whilst working with the ESRC-funded Centre for Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at the University of Manchester on a project related to ethnic minorities’ experiences of housing inequalities during the pandemic, and (2) the University of Edinburgh, working on JPI-Urban/Horizon 2020-funded Governance and Local Integration of Migrants and Europe’s Refugees (GLIMER) Project. Her interdisciplinary research interests encompass the governance of asylum and refuge in Scotland, UK and Europe, postcolonial power and migration in the Global North, and the entanglements of race, ethnicity, bordering and gender in the creation of citizenship regimes. She gained her PhD in Cultural Research from Heriot-Watt University in 2017, for which she won the MacFarlane Prize for outstanding contribution to research. Her recent article ‘The role of asylum in processes of gentrification’ was a 2021 ‘Highly Commended’ paper for the Sociological Review.
Project title: Archiving Somali-Scots Histories (ASSH) Project
The Archiving Somali Scots Histories (ASSH) Project will undertake a programme of research centred upon an unsorted collection of documents pertaining to the Somali Refugee Action Group held by the University of Edinburgh’s Special Collections. Aiming to both draw upon and expand previous research related to Somali migration to Scotland, the project seeks to mobilise the collection to (1) map the activities of the Group from the 1960s onwards, and place it in the context of migrant and race relations in Scotland and 2) gain insight into the impact of post/colonial relations between Somalia and Scotland in the immediate aftermath of Somali independence and beyond. The overall aim of the project is to gain a critical insight into how post/colonial entanglements have shaped Somali experiences of migration to and settlement in Scotland during a particularly significant time in their shared histories, and develop a critique of the operation of the coloniality of power in migration and post-migration environments.