Educational and employment pathways for queer youth seeking asylum in Australia

Saymore Masaisai’s academic and professional journey began in Zimbabwe and has continued through Japan and Ireland to Australia, shaped throughout by a strong commitment to education, leadership, and justice. Here he outlines how his interests evolved beyond teaching as practice to education as institutional transformation, why he chose to undertake his PhD in Australia and his determination to draw attention to the experiences of queer youth seeking asylum.

Can you tell us a bit about your academic and professional background

I began my career as a primary school teacher specialising in Early Childhood Development. While working as a teacher, I completed a Bachelor of Education in Educational Management and Leadership at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. During that time my interest moved beyond teaching as practice to education as leadership, policy, and institutional transformation.

During those teaching years, I was also involved in wider professional and policy engagement through my organisation, the Young Professional Educators of Zimbabwe Trust, where I participated in education policy debates alongside prominent figures in Zimbabwe. That exposure gave me an early appreciation of how education policy is shaped and it strengthened my conviction that educators must also be contributors to public debate.

From 2020 to 2022 I participated in a Research Exchange Programme in Educational Management and School Leadership and Administration at Tokyo Gakugei University under the MEXT Scholarship. In 2023, I earned a Master of Education (Honours with Distinction) in Leadership and Policy in Education from Trinity College Dublin as an Ireland Fellows Programme Africa Scholar, focusing on significance of educational leadership in addressing LGBTQ+ inequalities in Irish and South African schools.

Describe your PhD project and why you chose this topic

My thesis, Exploring Intersectionality: Navigating Educational and Employment Pathways for Queer Youth Seeking International Protection (Asylum Seekers) in Australia, brings together many of the questions that have shaped my journey: education, migration, race, sexuality, exclusion, and belonging.

It examines how queer youth seeking asylum in Australia, particularly those from African and West Asian backgrounds, navigate education, employment, and immigration systems while living at the crossroads of gender, race, sexuality, and asylum status. These are not separate categories of experience. They converge within broader structures of power (racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and xenophobia) that shape access to opportunity and the terms on which dignity, recognition, and belonging are granted or denied.

I work with participants through in-depth interviews, creative photovoice, and follow-up interviews to understand how they make meaning of their journeys and how they navigate the barriers placed before them. The study is guided by a Critical Intersectionality Framework that I developed from Critical Race, Queer, and Decolonial theories. That framework allows me to examine not only the layered nature of oppression, but also the ways in which queer asylum-seeking youth negotiate, endure, and respond to institutions that were never designed with them in mind.

I chose this topic for reasons that are both intellectual and deeply personal. Across my own international education, travel, and work experiences, I have encountered different forms of racism; from the diminishing of my academic and professional credentials to workplace discrimination and racial profiling in airports. Those experiences revealed how power works quietly, but decisively, in structuring who is trusted, who is welcomed, and who is made to justify their presence. They also left me with a growing frustration at how often these realities are minimised or treated as incidental. That understanding deepened further through my interactions with fellow Africans seeking asylum in Ireland. It was clear to me that exclusion is never experienced along a single axis and this sharpened my resolve to pursue research that examines the full complexity of how oppression operates.

My Master’s dissertation, which explored LGBTQ+-specific inequalities in education, opened an important line of inquiry for me. When I came across my current supervisor’s PhD call under the Critical Perspectives on Youth Project, I immediately recognised the possibility of bringing these strands together in a way that was both timely and necessary. I drew inspiration from that earlier research, but I also wanted to go further.

I wanted to approach it from a multidisciplinary perspective that takes seriously both intersecting identities and intersecting systems of oppression. That, for me, is where the real work begins. Because if we are to understand how queer youth seeking asylum move through education and employment pathways in Australia, we must be willing to confront the full architecture of exclusion they are navigating and the forms of resilience and political meaning they forge within it.

What are you hoping to achieve with your research?

What I hope to achieve is a substantive intervention at a time when anti-immigration rhetoric has become deeply embedded across much of the West and asylum seekers are routinely scapegoated for structural failures they did not create. For queer youth seeking asylum, this hostility is especially cruel, because many of them have no safe home to return to.

My work is committed to making the experiences of queer youth seeking asylum more visible, more legible, and harder to ignore. Not as objects of sympathy, but as people whose lives expose the limitations of existing policy frameworks and whose insights demand to be taken seriously.

Ultimately, I want this research to leave a mark on how institutions think, how policies are designed, and how communities are heard. It comes at a moment of deep polarisation and rising hostility, and that is precisely why it must be unequivocal. If my work can help move the conversation from token inclusion to structural accountability, and from silence to recognition, then it will have done something worthwhile.

How has your experience with your supervisors been?

My experience with my supervisors, Associate Professor David Farrugia and Associate Professor Tebeje Molla, has been exceptionally positive. They have been remarkably supportive, but what I value most is the spirit in which that support is offered. They treat me not simply as a student, but as a developing scholar and colleague. Their support has not been confined to the thesis alone. They have invested in me as an emerging researcher, helping me think seriously about life beyond the PhD, about the kind of academic and public intellectual profile I am building, and what it means to develop a meaningful and sustained research career. What they are offering is not just supervision in the narrow sense; it is mentorship in the fullest sense of the word. In a journey as demanding as doctoral research, that kind of support is invaluable, and I do not take it for granted.