Paper short abstract:

This paper considers a particular diasporic community in the UK over time, with an emphasis on the entanglement between assistance imaginaries and immigration trajectories such as refugee resettlement. In particular, it considers education as a particular form of diasporic future-making.

Paper long abstract:

Humanitarian aid in the African diaspora is not a new phenomenon, though elements of scope, speed and capacity of responses have shifted. In this paper, I aim to explore the humanitarian engagement of a particular diasporic group – in this case Somalis in Bolton, UK – over time, from coordinated family reunification in the early 1990s to education and aid provision in the 2020s. During this period the Somali community grew from a handful of individual families to a vibrant group with several community organizations – growth facilitated in part by third country resettlement from Dadaab. I suggest that, in the case of this Somali community, the changing shapes of aid responds not only to condensed distances and circulating imaginaries of global connectivity, but also to experiences of refugeedom, humanitarian infrastructure, and resettlement. Diasporic aid to Somalia or Dadaab is therefore intertwined with transnational imaginaries of resettlement alongside local asylum aid in Bolton and narratives of ‘home’. As an example I explore education aid as a particular form of diasporic future-making, which connects supplementary school projects in the UK with education projects and aid projects in Somalia and Kenya. Through engagement with the Somali diaspora in Bolton, I aim to explore the imaginaries and potential futures - for the diasporic community, for individuals, for Somalia - circulating in education aid.