Biography
Helidah Ogude-Chambert is a researcher, practitioner, and lecturer of migration/mobilities, race and international development. Inspired by works in Black Studies, Black geographies, decolonial feminist thought, and discourse-affect theories, her interdisciplinary research examines how political elites manipulate emotions and public discourse to normalise migrant precarity and justify state practices of cruelty and racialised expulsion.
Currently, Helidah is working on turning her PhD dissertation into a book manuscript entitled Strange Fish: The U.K. Government and Media’s Industrialization of Black Death at Sea. She is also conceptualising a related exhibition called Being Affected: Emotions that Engineer Black Death.
She has over 15 years of professional experience in migration and development practice, including working across Africa and East Asia as a Social Development Specialist for the World Bank, as a Senior Policy Researcher for the Government of South Africa (The Presidency & Economic Ministry) and a Researcher at the International Crisis Group (U.N. Advocacy office in New York).
Helidah holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy (Migration Policy) from The New School in New York and an MS in Global Affairs (Conflict Prevention and International Development) from New York University. She was previously a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre.
She is currently a Departmental Lecturer in Migration & Development at Oxford Department of International Development and a non-resident Senior Fellow at New York University’s Centre for Global Affairs (2023/24).
Select publications
Ogude-Chambert, H. et al (2026) Can Redistribution Change Policy Views? Aid and Attitudes toward Refugees, Journal of Political Economy, 133 (9); University of Chicago
Ogude-Chambert, H. (2025) Cruel Colonial Re-Imaginings, Refugee History
Ogude-Chambert, H. (2025) Being Deathworthy: The UK Government and Media’s Industrialization of Black Death at Sea in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics; Cambridge University Press
Ogude-Chambert, H. (2023) What our Waters Remember: On Wasted Bodies as Strange Fish, University of Oxford, Border Criminologies Blog
Ogude-Chambert, H. (2022) The U.K. and Migrant Men from the Global South, Africa is a Country
Ogude, H. (2020) “An Unethical, Minimal, and Cruel Welfare State: COVID-19 and the Makings of a Demoralized U.S. Citizenry,” Global Policy Journal, Wiley-Blackwell
Ogude, H. & Chekero, T. (2020) (Im)mobility and social networks: The Impact of COVID-19 on Critical Coping Mechanisms for Urban Refugees, Development for Peace, World Bank Blogs
Ogude, H. & Sarkar, A. (2018) The Urban Dimensions of Mixed Migration and Forced Displacement in South Africa, Development for Peace Blog, The World Bank
Ogude, H. (2016) Making Europe White…Again, Africa is a Country