Diaspora studies postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in diaspora studies grew out of a fairly ordinary observation. The high street I walk down to reach work has three shops that were once a single co-operative store: a barber, a phone repair kiosk and a grocer selling Polish and Punjabi goods side by side. Over eighteen months I photographed the frontages each season, noted the languages used on signs and handwritten notices, and recorded short conversations with four shopkeepers who agreed to speak to me. I used free mapping software to plot the changes and a borrowed camera because I did not want to rely on my phone. The project cost me almost nothing and taught me a great deal about how much interpretation a single street can bear. One grocer described his stock list as a record of who had arrived most recently; that remark reframed my reading of the whole row.

My History degree gave me the groundwork for this. My dissertation examined how local newspapers reported Pakistani and Polish settlement in a Lancashire mill town between 1960 and 1980, drawing on microfilmed editions at the central library and two interviews with members of my own extended family. Comparing the two coverages was instructive: Polish arrivals were frequently described through wartime service and Catholic parish life, while Pakistani arrivals were discussed almost entirely through housing and employment. I learned to be cautious about treating the press as a mirror of opinion, and to read absences as carefully as statements. I also learned the limits of family interviews, where I was both researcher and grandchild, and where my questions often shaped the answers more than I intended.

Reading has pushed me further. Avtar Brah's idea of diaspora space, in which the entanglement of those who move and those who stay put is taken seriously, matched what I was seeing on the high street better than any model based on a single group's trajectory. Stuart Hall's essays on cultural identity helped me stop looking for an authentic original culture behind the shop signs. I would like to read more in transnational family and remittance studies, and to work properly with theories of second and third generation attachment rather than relying on the handful of texts I have found through my public library and open-access journals.

Work and community commitments have been formative in ways I did not expect. At the building society I take mortgage and savings enquiries, which has made me attentive to how people describe their obligations to relatives abroad, and to how institutional forms handle those obligations badly. On Thursday evenings I help at a conversation class at a community centre, mostly with adult learners from Eastern Europe, Iraq and Eritrea. I prepare materials, keep the register and sit with whoever needs slower practice. It has improved my patience and my listening, and it has made me sceptical of writing about communities without spending unstructured time in them.

Postgraduate study would give me the methodological training my own project lacked. I want to learn how to design and archive oral history properly, how to handle consent and anonymity with people whose immigration status may be precarious, and how to situate a single street within wider migration scholarship. In the longer term I hope to work in a local archive or heritage service, where collections of this kind are often thin, and where I think careful collecting matters more than grand claims. I would bring to the course a habit of sustained, small-scale observation and the discipline of having studied alongside full-time work.

Review this personal statement

Latest reviews