International Research Teams and Vis-aaaaaaaaaarghs

15 October 2023

By Jane Nebe, Jennifer Agbaire, Alison Buckler  

A key focus in Ibali is how academics from different parts of the world research in different parts of the world. We are asking: how does our positionality shape how storytelling research is carried out, critiqued and taken forward in different contexts? This means that the team travel between Nigeria, South Africa and the UK. 

So far however, a question that looms larger than our research question is: can we all get to be in the different contexts in order to research in them?  

In this blog, we share three team members’ experiences of securing permission to travel to Cape Town for a workshop.  

Jane - Nigerian academic, with a Nigerian passport, based in Nigeria 

I carry my Nigerian identity with pride and, sometimes, privilege. My involvement in Ibali as an ethnographer was facilitated by the privilege of being a Nigerian who resides in Nigeria: the advert for my role had specifically asked for this. However, there are instances when the characteristics that provide privileges can become a tool for exclusion. One such context is international travel. 

A Nigerian passport holder can enter 23 countries without a visa and get a visa on arrival in 32 countries but requires a visa to enter 141 countries. Most of the more easily accessible countries are within Sub-Saharan Africa while the 141 countries that require a visa are predominantly in the other continents of the world. However, several countries in North Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa also require visas from Nigerian passport holders, although they are geographically situated within the same continent. Thus, a researcher within Africa does not only have to deal with exclusionary visa policies from outside the continent but within Africa as well. While the sociocultural, historical, political, and economic dynamics that have shaped this situation are not the focus of this blog, the chaos and consequences that it mediates on doing research, is a concern. 

Ibali scheduled a storytelling workshop for young people in Cape Town in January 2023. I was looking forward to doing ethnography in a context I had never been to and working with young people that might be different from those I had worked with previously in Nigeria and the UK. 

My first attempt at applying for a visa to attend this workshop resulted in a refusal. This was my first and I hope, the last. So, I reapplied for the same visa and included the additional document that had been mentioned as the reason for the visa refusal. This time, I got the visa, but it arrived 18 days after the workshop had ended! 

My inability to attend the workshop meant that I was excluded from a research experience that could have enriched my knowledge and contributions to the project. The process of applying for the visa and waiting for the outcome was time-consuming, financially demanding, and emotionally draining. This pales in comparison to the burden of knowing that I now have a visa refusal in my travel history that I must always account for in subsequent visa applications: another layer of unnecessary scrutiny on my future travel. On the other hand, I have learnt that visa applications should be applied for as early as possible, clarifications must be obtained for requirements that appear confusing and all the required documentation must be provided exactly as it was requested; irrespective of one’s travel history. 

Travel visa inequality, which some have likened to ‘Travel Apartheid’, a situation where certain national passports have a higher privilege of access compared to some other passports is a widespread phenomenon. I am also unable to attend the next Ibali workshop in South Africa because I need 6 months' validity on my passport to be able to apply for the South African visa. 

Various issues have prevented Ibali members travelling: the pandemic, illness, other work commitments, and so on. My reason has consistently been due to exclusionary visa policies that I have no control over. Issues like this should be put into consideration at the onset of developing an international project with researchers from across different contexts. I earnestly hope that visa policies globally will become more favourable for holders of passports that have unequal and limited access to international travel and migration. In the meantime, I remain proudly Nigerian! 

Jennifer - Nigerian academic, with a Nigerian passport, based in the UK 

Before we started our visa application, Jane and I had joked about the rather vague idea of what I tagged hierarchies within hierarchies of less privilege in the process. We did not quite realise that our actual experience might become a portrait of this. We both had a Nigerian passport and needed to follow the exact same process to obtain a South African visa. As Jane has described, it is not a simple or quick process - indeed, ‘quick’ and ‘simple’ would not describe the visa application process of many countries. I spent many days sourcing and gathering the required documents and then several more agonising about whether I had them all right – immigration websites do not always provide the clearest information about this. I was particularly puzzled by the requirement to present six-months of personal bank statements despite the trip being fully sponsored by my employer and my ability to present ample official proof of this. 

The immigration office also specifies that accommodation must be booked prior to the visa application. This meant going to the trouble of booking a random hotel that we may not actually stay in (the visa application needed to commence before we could confirm a suitable venue for our research workshop) and then spending time via a series of emails updating the hotel about the visa application status. As we could not reassure them that we would show up or even use the venue if we did, it was a difficult and time-consuming process for the hotel too. Might they cancel our reservation if we were costing them money? Would this affect our visa application as we awaited a decision? 

But it was only in these ‘overall-picture’ issues that Jane and I shared a similar experience. In-between the lines, there were differences brought on by where we were applying from - in our capacities to respond to the issues and our access to useful and timely support: I had the ‘perk’ of being employed, and legally residing in the UK. 

For example, our institution prefers us to cover the visa fees, including the costs of the biometrics appointment, ourselves and then claim the money back with a receipt. This is not ideal in any circumstance, but I could immediately claim these expenses from the project and, by giving the administrator advance notice of my claim, was reimbursed within days. Jane is not so ‘lucky’. She would have to wait months for the reimbursement because of the complicated terms of her contract as a non-UK-based freelance academic. We can theoretically request for advance funds to cover international colleagues’ large upfront costs, but this involves an incredible amount of administrative time for multiple parties and is often incompatible with complex trip and visa scheduling. 

I also applied with access to stable electricity and internet which many academics, freelance or employed, do not ‘enjoy’ in lower-income contexts like Nigeria – Jane certainly didn’t. Incessant power outages and limited access to good internet make the online visa application process difficult, creating multiple possibilities for application errors, compounded by the pressure of limited time to apply. 

Once I completed the online application and attended my physical biometrics in London, my visa arrived in record time. There have been suggestions that my application decision turnaround was perhaps more straightforward because of my UK residency. That is, I am considered duly ‘vetted’ by the more highly regarded (relative to Nigerian) UK immigration system. I therefore require no deep scrutiny. Is this a legacy of neo-colonial consciousness? Surely, a topic for debate! 

Through all of this, I am reminded of the dynamic notion of the diaspora as an articulation of difference presented by Markus Nehl in the book, Transnational Black Dialogues. This is an understanding of cultural identity that introduces the ideas of discontinuity and difference in the black African experience possibly induced by movement. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Nehl argues “that cultural identities are not stable and resistant to changes but rather “subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power”. He explains that this notion “acknowledges that there are important similarities between individuals of the same culture as well as “critical points of deep and significant difference”. 

For me, sitting right on the same spot as the danger of presuming neutral power relations among racialised groups is the potential error in presuming that attendant hierarchies are always a one-way street. Since our visa experience, I have become more curious about my concept of hierarchies within hierarchies of less privilege especially for collaborative endeavours in the international development space. I wonder: in what other circumstances might Jane have been ‘more privileged’ than me and vice versa? And of course, why?! 

Alison - UK academic with a UK passport, based in the UK 

Jane and Jennifer’s experiences of getting visas for South Africa (or not) were uncomfortable to experience by proxy and make uncomfortable reading now. This is especially so because my contribution to this article could just read: “bought ticket, got on plane, arrived in Cape Town”.  

The visa issue has rumbled on in the background since the start of Ibali. As a team we’re sadly hardened now to the uncertainties of visa applications, but the experience outlined above was especially challenging, perhaps because (as Jane suggests) we were expecting visas for travel between African countries to be more straightforward than between African countries and the UK.  

As the PI I was frustrated: this is a complex study with key, distinct roles and the absence of one person from a workshop has an irredeemable impact on the data we generate. As PI I was also conscious that the project was also very much out-of-pocket: when visas are not straightforward there are unanticipated costs that are difficult to pitch to funders (for example we now book fully flexible flight reservations for trips where visas are in play – often at double the cost of standard prices. If a visa is rejected there is no refund and we have to start over – and pay – again, or if there is not time, and travel costs are not flexible, we lose thousands of pounds). This obviously has a knock-on effect on other project expenditure.  

As Jane and Jennifer’s colleague I was worried: I could see how time-consuming and emotionally draining it was for them to attend to all of the micro-details and micro-anxieties of each complicated step, and I understood (but was unable to remedy) the tension between their desire to be in Cape Town, and their ability to be there.  

As a British citizen I was embarrassed: my passport grants me so much more freedom and certainty when thinking about where to travel, collaborate and research, and I hate the unfairness between colleagues.  

As a team we were anxious and sad: we chose to work together because we genuinely enjoy being and learning together, and missed opportunities have an impact on professional and personal dynamics.  

Shortly after the Cape Town trip, we started preparing for a workshop in Nigeria. I required a visa – as did the other UK and South African team members. While the time, cost and complexity of the process was exhausting and emotional (compiling more than 50 pages of forms, letters and documents – each of which had to be precisely aligned with the others in every single detail, combined with confusing and wrong information provided by a third-party visa agency and a passport being stolen), in a way I felt grateful to have experienced the complicated scrutiny, anxiety and powerlessness so close (in time) to Jane and Jennifer’s experience (and we all enjoyed the fact that – of course – they did not need visas for this workshop!). 

Collectively, these experiences have led us to thinking about what we can *do* to make things easier and fairer for international research teams in relation to visas. Here are some of our suggestions, we’d love to hear from you if you have more!  

Ibali team commitments to visa issues  

• If a visa is rejected (even if due to personal error) the project will cover the costs of the rejected visa and any subsequent applications: individual academics should not bear the cost of unfair and opaque systems.  
• Where possible and appropriate, we the project will cover costs of a visa-support service to facilitate easier applications and increase the likelihood of visas being granted (in this project we are moving travel funds around to accommodate this, but in future grant applications we will factor this into the budget).  
• We will work consistently with the same visa-support companies to facilitate easier and quicker applications.  
• We accept the additional costs of fully-flexible travel arrangements (and will pay more attention to costing these in future grant applications).  
• We maintain a database of template visa letters for the project (the more applications we do, the more we learn about the very specific wording of statements around financial support and immigration support).  
• We start as early as possible – the process always takes longer than anticipated. 
• We work online where possible, but Ibali has an end-of-project whole-team, in-person project meeting coming up in January. It will be the final time – but due to visa issues, also only the second time - we are all together in one physical location. We can no longer assume it makes sense to arrange to meet in the ‘home’ country of one of the team members. To ensure we can all be together we need to look further afield: Tanzania, for example has been recommended as an accessible country for those with African passports. 

Thanks to Katherine Collins, Ibali's UK ethnographer, for coming up with the title for this blog!