Uneradicable relations…
By Hyab T. Yohannes
As 2025 recedes into memory, I find myself dwelling not simply on what the year sustained, but on how it was lived. It was a year that pressed insistently upon my intellect while quietly consuming the life I embody, demanding attention, patience, integrity, and ethical presence. Such a time is measured not by its linear passing, but by the depth of consciousness we bring to it.
Intellectually, the pursuit of understanding the refugee abyss, the poetics of refuge, and relational becoming-with has largely animated my scholarly work, in which I actively seek relational, restorative, and embodied modes of being, knowing, and relating. I tend to think that research must resist linearity and exceed instrumental time. Knowledge does not arrive on schedule, nor does it submit easily to institutional metrics of efficiency and output. Instead, it emerges through attentiveness: through the slow labour of close reading, the ethical discipline of sustained listening, and the careful openness that comes through speaking with dignity. Knowing must always remain in uneradicable relation with the unknown, just as existence is not a solitary fact of being, but a relational unfolding of becoming-with others.
On a more personal note, the year intensified my awareness of vulnerability as a shared ontological condition. Yet it can also be deeply personal when streets are overtaken by hostile riots and politics are overwhelmed by racialised and toxic grammars. To sustain life under such conditions requires an ongoing praxis of attentiveness to the physical and affective dimensions of one’s own existence. To remain vulnerable, I was reminded, is not an individual struggle to overcome, but a condition of possibility, sustained through shared trust, care, and everyday acts of mutual support.
My work at the University of Glasgow continues to unfold within this tension, where critical inquiry and ethical responsibility are inseparably entangled, and where both remain precarious. In a world persistently marked by displacement, violence, and profound inequality, the task of scholarship cannot be neutral; in fact, it is increasingly an existential deviation from everything that appears to be taken for granted.
As I look ahead, I do so with a renewed commitment to relational thinking, to non-exclusive and inhabitable dimensions of life and living, and to forms of inquiry that resist haste. Persistence, it seems, is a necessary poetic ethic.
Thought provoking and inspiring reflection.
A nice piece and compassionate reflection. Thank you for using your voice to highlight this issue and the need for empathy and responsibility in this unpredictable political environment we live.
Your book, Refugee Abyss highlights the human impact of the refugee crisis and the urgent need for compassion and practical action. It is very important work.
I appreciate the clarity and care in how you’ve addressed such a complex issue.
A nice piece and compassionate reflection. Thank you for using your voice to highlight this issue and the need for empathy and responsibility in this unpredictable political environment we live.
Your book, Refugee Abyss highlights the human impact of the refugee crisis and the urgent need for compassion and practical action.
Nice reflection. So proud of you and the work you’ve done through your book the Refugee Abyss. Thank you, for being a voice for those who are voiceless. It needs courage, resilience and compassion for supporting people affected.