Where will I be in ten years?: Afro-diasporic temporalities and imagined futures among African students at UNILAB

Abstract

“Where will you be in ten Years?” was the closing question in 25 in-depth interviews conducted, between October and November 2024, with African students at the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonía Afro-Brasileira (UNILAB), in Redenção, Ceará, Brazil. This article examines how these students from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, elaborate imagined futures from their experience of South-South student mobility. It argues that the future does not appear as a linear trajectory or a fully controllable decision, but as a field of dispute among return, permanence, transnational circulation, academic training, family ties, and political condition in countries of origin. Methodologically, the research combines participant observation and in-depth interviews, whose initial transcription, supported by artificial intelligence, was manually reviewed and contextualized. Thematic coding identified six non-exclusive categories: conditioned return, pragmatic permanence in Brazil, transnational circulation, academic-professional future, family future, and open or uncertain future. Results show that return is rarely imagined as an immediate homecoming, being instead associated with obtaining a degree, recognition, and social contribution; that international circulation does not necessarily imply rupture with the country of origin: and that university education expands capacities to aspire without guaranteeing employment, stability, or recognition. UNILAB, located in a municipality historically associated with the abolition of slavery, constitutes and ambivalent space that expands possibilities for Afro-diasporic futures without ensuring their realization. The article contributes to the debate on African temporalities by revealing plural, situated, and relational temporal regimes produced outside the continent, yet inseparable from it.