Helidah Ogude-Chambert

Helidah Ogude-Chambert is a Departmental Lecturer in Migration and Development at the Oxford Department of International Development. She is an interdisciplinary social anthropologist and migration practitioner whose research sits at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, affect, migration, development and political violence. She is a Research Affiliate at COMPAS and a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand.

Across her work, Helidah asks how political violence is manufactured as an ordinary part of political life: how particular forms of violence, especially against Black and negatively racialised people on the move, are represented and made sensible in ways that render them legitimate, necessary or not perceptible as violence at all. In pursuing this question, she brings into sustained conversation several knowledge traditions: Black studies and Black geographies, affect theory, critical visual culture, anti-colonial feminist thought, gender and sexuality studies, queer death studies and critical border studies.

Her current research develops across four interconnected strands. Her forthcoming first monograph, Strange Fish, examines how the deaths of Black migrant men in the English Channel and Mediterranean Sea are made politically ordinary in Britain through emotional atmospheres assembled across newsprint media, state discourse and visual culture. Extending her published work on Black death-making at sea, the book develops white futurity as a way of understanding how racial politics organises not only histories but imagined futures: whose lives, families, mobility and security those futures are organised to protect.

A second project follows narratives of white injury across South Africa, Britain and the United States, examining the transnational networks through which whiteness travels and is remade, and how these narratives shape mobility and humanitarian protection. The 2025 resettlement of Afrikaners to the United States is its central case. Her forthcoming Safundi article, “Affects for a White Planetary Future: Denialism, Innocence, and Injury in the Making of the Afrikaner Refugee,” develops this work.

A third strand concerns method: how anti-colonial feminist and Black traditions of knowledge might reshape the study of migration and racialisation. Helidah is developing recomposition as a methodological practice that brings different texts, histories, places and scales into relationships obscured by conventional disciplinary, racial and national categories.

A fourth explores sound, image, literary form and embodied experience as modes of knowledge about human movement, dispossession, belonging and liberation. This work brings together her published poetry, a forthcoming contribution to Atlas of Uncertainty, and The Cracks that Whisper Us, a forthcoming podcast about memory, story and place — roots and routes — jointly supported by the University of Oxford and the University of the Witwatersrand.

Helidah convenes graduate courses in the Governance of Migration and Qualitative Methods for Social Research. Her multimodal and multisensorial approach to teaching brings film, music, poetry, policy, visual culture and lived experience into conversation with academic scholarship. She received an Oxford Social Sciences Division Teaching Excellence Award in 2025.

Before entering academia, Helidah spent more than fifteen years as a migration and development practitioner, including at the World Bank, the Government of South Africa and the International Crisis Group’s UN advocacy office in New York. This experience continues to shape her interest in the institutional life of categories: how distinctions between refugees, migrants, citizens and other mobile subjects are made, and the political work those distinctions perform.

Helidah holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy from The New School.