Second, third … but never first

It is difficult for many to find meaningful employment, especially for those who come from working-class families or who, like me, are immigrants without inherited networks. Unemployment is rarely a story people share at dinner tables or over Saturday night drinks. In our hyper-performative culture, where value is measured by productivity and status, being unemployed quietly marks you as suspect—someone who must have failed.

After 19 years of continuous work and professional growth, I found myself unemployed for the first time. Six months of waiting, applying, hoping. It was painful and instructive. A time of learning, reflection, and recalibration. I submitted 55 applications. I was invited to 22 interviews. I prepared and delivered 8 presentations. I made it to two second-round interviews. I do not claim to have been flawless in all of them. But in a few, I was clearly perceived not as a professional, but as “other” or better as an immigrant with a Mediterranean accent.

Though I’ve lived in London for nine years and became a naturalised British citizen before the referendum, this moment of forced stillness made me confront, with fresh clarity, what it means to be an economic migrant in England. I encountered discrimination not once, but three times—in a school, a youth charity, and an arts organisation. Ironically, all three sat at the intersection of the fields where my work has flourished: social justice, education, and the arts.

My career began in 1998 as a trainee social worker, co-creating a shadow theatre performance with young immigrants in a youth club in Athens. That early project was supported by the late Evgenios Spatharis—Greece’s most prominent shadow theatre artist—and his museum. Since then, I have spent over two decades building a practice that blends social work and cultural education, using applied drama, oral history, music, documentary, and heritage interpretation to support marginalised youth.

In 2015, I entered the UK arts sector as a cultural education leader and later began a part-time doctorate at Goldsmiths, researching how museums can better serve young people on the margins of society. Yet, during my job search, I often felt compelled to hide my doctoral studies. fearful that employers would see me as “too academic,” “too ambitious,” or simply “not one of us.” I’ve had to resist the narrow assumptions that a PhD leads only to academia, or that only traditional arts professionals are qualified to speak about youth engagement.

More frustrating still is the tokenism that emerged after UK government youth policy shifted to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Suddenly, everyone in the cultural sector became a youth expert. But few had actually worked directly with young people. Fewer still had done so across borders, disciplines, and generations.

I do not say this in bitterness. I say it because it reveals something deeper: a reluctance to trust someone like me with leadership—despite my qualifications, lived experience, and unwavering values.

I cannot offer myself to a sector that only wants me behind the scenes. I long to be trusted on the stage.

When I graduated from the Department of Social Work at the Higher Education Institute of Patras in 1999, I took an oath—not unlike the one doctors make. Mine committed me to “study and stand critical towards the trends in science, technology, and culture, and to selflessly and vigorously serve peace, democracy, and social justice.”

That promise lives in everything I do. From archiving my family’s stories at the age of six, to interviewing refugees from Minor Asia as a teenager, to my current research, I have always known that heritage and memory are tools for justice. And that education, in the deepest sense, is about helping others find their voice.

So when I apply for jobs—not to backstage roles, but to public-facing positions in 21 different cultural institutions—and I am still not chosen, I hold on to this truth:

It is not that I am not qualified.

It is not that I am second best.

It is that trust comes slowly, painfully, and often too late for those who speak with an accent, but with clarity.

For those who study not for prestige, but for purpose.

For those who serve—not to rise—but to lift others.