Dr Haleemah Alaydi

Dr Haleemah Alaydi is a Research Fellow on The Crisis of Migration Discourse (CMD): Towards a Participatory New Lexicon of Migration at the School of Media and Communication, University of Westminster. Her work examines how migration narratives, policy and public discourse construct migration through the lens of crisis, particularly in relation to people who use unauthorised routes to enter the EU and the UK. She collaborates with illegalised migrants as agents of change to co-create counter-narratives and develop intercultural dialogue.

Haleemah is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK (AFHEA). She holds a PhD in English with Creative Writing from the University of York (passed with no corrections), where her practice-based research explored arts-based methods in migration research and the temporal dimensions of migration journeys from the Arab world. Her doctoral studies were fully funded by the Acton-Goodman Scholarship and the Department of English and Related Literature. She also holds an MA in Writing for Performance and Publication (Distinction) from the University of Leeds, which was fully funded by a Chevening Scholarship.

Before joining Westminster, Haleemah held policy and research consultancies with leading non-governmental and research organisations across the UK and Jordan including UNESCO, UNRWA, Refugee Action, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and Refugee Education UK (REUK). 

Drawing on five years of fieldwork with forced migrants, her research bridges academic inquiry, trauma-informed approaches and policy work. She has presented her findings internationally and is committed to advancing participatory action research that centres the lived experiences of displaced people.

Haleemah is a member of the CAMRI research institute and the Homelands research centre at the University of Westminster.

Haleemah’s research examines the intersections of migration, critical discourse and criminalisation, with a particular focus on how policy narratives contribute to the criminalisation of irregular migrants. Her current work contributes to The Crisis of Migration Discourse (CMD): Towards a Participatory New Lexicon of Migration, an international and interdisciplinary research project that challenges crisis-based framings of migration. The project collaborates with migrants and community organisations to co-create alternative, participatory vocabularies of migration that promote intercultural understanding and social justice.

Her broader research interests include forced migration, racial justice, border externalisation, migration temporalities, the criminalisation of refugees, postcolonial feminist theory, refugee education and the asylum system. Specifically, she is interested in the role of trauma-informed participatory approaches in the representations of refugee subjectivities.

Haleemah’s doctoral research, completed at the University of York, combined creative and critical methodologies to explore the temporal dimensions of migration journeys from the Arab world. Her project examined how refugee narratives capture the experience of waiting and stuckness, memory and precarity, and how creative practice can serve as a method of knowledge production in migration studies.

Her research is published in the Channel Crossings research report which examines the UK's government responses to small boat Channel crossings (2025) and an article titled "Refugees as Peer Researchers" in the Experiences of Displaced Young People Living in England: January to March 2024 research report. Her editorial work includes the UNESCO handbook Do You Speak MIL? Media and Information Literacy for Jordanian CSOs. She also presented key findings from Channel Crossings, a major three-year research project examining small-boat Channel crossings, the policies that shape them and possible alternative policy approaches, at the UK Parliament in October 2025.

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.