Wasey Khalil, M.A.

Wasey Khalil (Pakistan) – Research project/PhD-project on “Migration in the context of social transformation and figurations – Perspectives and experiences of Afghan and Pakistani refugees in Germany”.

Wasey Ullah Khalil comes from Pakistan, where he was a PhD student at the University of Peshawar. He did his research on the topic of “Proxy wars and migration”, which led him to interview internally displaced and migrated persons as well as their families, and additionally illegalized migrants from Afghanistan in Pakistani camps. This motivated him to work beyond IDPs’ issues and to expand his research to illegalized migrants. Furthermore, he headed an organization focusing on the education about religion and religious extremism. In 2013 he was forced to leave Pakistan due to a blasphemy case against him, which put his life at risk, so he fled Pakistan and entered Germany in October 2015 as an Asylum seeker. Since the beginning of 2016 he has been living in Göttingen. At first he was a guest student at the Georg-August-University, then he resumed his PhD studies at the department of Prof. Dr Gabriele Rosenthal where he learned about biographical methods. As scholarship holder of the program “Wissenschaft.Niedersachsen.Weltoffen” for scholars in danger, he is being funded by the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony.

The primary goal of his PhD-research is to study families and life histories of illegalized migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan in Germany. He wants to reconstruct the process of migration and the migrants’ experiences on their routes of migration, as well as their current perspectives, so those processes that lead to leaving the home country and the following biographical development. The secondary goal of the research is to highlight the effects on the patterns of action and transformation of emotions of the illegalized migrants during their journeys from their respective home countries to Germany. This research interest is to be achieved by a biographical approach.