Christine Job, J.D. · Admitted PhD Student in Migration Studies · ICS–Universidade de Lisboa · Beginning Autumn 2026
Christine Job | Photo Cred: Brian Cahill Moledo
Christine Job, J.D., is a cultural theorist and public scholar whose work sits at the intersection of Black feminist thought, migration studies, and oral history. Over nine years embedded in Europe as a Black American woman, she has built one of the most substantive primary research archives on Black women's voluntary migration. With 150+ life-history interviews across **Flourish in the Foreign,** an award-winning podcast featured in Vogue Arabia and Business Insider. Her scholarship interrogates the forced/voluntary migration binary, arguing that Black American women's movement abroad is simultaneously chosen and structurally compelled and that existing frameworks fail to account for it.
Black women are leaving the United States.
They are leaving for psychological safety, medical dignity, economic autonomy, and the possibility of a life that does not cost them their bodies. They are leaving for Lisbon, Accra, Mexico City, and Barcelona in numbers no government agency is counting, through channels no policy framework is tracking, into cities that have no adequate tools to understand what is happening, or what it means for the communities already there.
My name is Christine Job. For six years, I have documented this movement through Flourish in the Foreign, an oral history archive of 150+ long-form interviews with Black women across the diaspora, built entirely through my own resources, now recognized in the top 1.5% of podcasts globally. No institutional backing. No research grant. No university affiliation. Every interview, every episode, every essay — self-funded, self-produced, and reaching a global audience anyway.
This autumn, that changes. I have been admitted to the PhD Programme in Migration Studies at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa. For the first time, I will have the institutional home, the scholarly infrastructure, and the dedicated time to do what six years of independent work have been building toward: rigorous, policy-relevant, publicly translatable research.
The question driving that research:
When Black women leave, are they free? Or are they just somewhere else?
150+
Oral history interviews, self-funded over 6 years
Top 1.5%
Global podcast ranking, no institutional support
9 years
Living as a voluntary migrant in Spain — embedded in this population