Mr Ahmed Elmi

Ahmed Elmi is a Graduate Teacher and an ESRC-funded PhD researcher in Political Science at the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was previously a visiting doctoral scholar at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS), University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa; and an affiliate researcher at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), in Nairobi, Kenya. In 2025, he served on the programming and curatorial team for GALA Queer Archive’s ‘Margins for Error’ exhibition on queer African art, film, and publishing; also in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is currently based in Bristol, United Kingdom, completing his doctoral thesis, provisionally titled: ‘Bravery amidst Brutality: A Queer Resistance to Violence and Criminalisation in Contemporary Kenya.’  

Grounded in queer African epistemologies and feminist methodologies, his research examines violence against queer people in Kenya, interrogating the intersections of sexuality, politics, and structural marginalisation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in four urban centres: Eldoret, Kisumu, Mombasa and Nairobi, his work analyses vulnerability and resistance within postcolonial queer politics, contributing to debates on anti-LGBTQ+ moral panics, mediated queerphobia, legitimised violence, decolonial praxis, digitality, futurity, and the reimagining of Africa’s social and political landscape for queer communities. At the University of Bristol, he is a member of the Centre for Black Humanities, the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre, and the Sexualities Research Group.   

Ahmed is also interested in state politics and political party systems across Africa, having conducted research with the Political Parties Database Project (PPDP), and the Political Parties in Africa Project (PPA), at the University of Bristol, as well as the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project (DALP) at Duke University, in the United States. Through these works, he has collected quantitative data on elections, party organisation, and political leadership in Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia, and produced comparative country-specific dossiers on Angola, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Zambia. In his capacity as a teacher at the University of Bristol, he leads and delivers undergraduate seminars on political theory, with a focus on contemporary global politics.   

He holds an MSc in Social Science Research Methods (Politics) from the University of Bristol, and an MA in Global Media and Communication from the University of Leicester. For both programmes, he was the top-ranked student in his cohort, and on both occasions was awarded the Prize for Best Overall Performance, which is conferred upon the graduating student with the highest overall grade-average. In 2022, Ahmed was awarded a full PhD scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He is a member of the Royal African Society, the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom, the British International Studies Association, and the Political Studies Association.