Catherine L. Crooke
Biography
Catherine Crooke (she/they) is a sociology PhD student at UCLA and an advocate for refugees and asylum seekers. Catherine’s research interests include the sociology of refugee law and the construction of refugeehood as a legal status, a political concept, and a social category. Catherine’s current research uses ethnography to study asylum lawyering in Los Angeles, examining how immigration attorneys adapt their work to navigate exclusionary policies of migration control.
Before pursuing her PhD, Catherine worked at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and with various organizations supporting displaced people in Lebanon, Jordan, the Caribbean, and the United States. Catherine holds a JD from Yale Law School and an MSc in Refugee & Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford.
Degrees
- M.A., Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2021
- J.D., Yale Law School, 2019
- M.Sc., Refugee & Forced Migration Studies, University of Oxford, 2014
- B.A., Comparative Literature & Society, Columbia University, 2012
Fields of Study
Law & Society, Sociology of Law, Refugee & Asylum Law, International Migration, Forced Migration, Ethnography, Qualitative Methods
Awards & Grants
- Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, 2021–2024
- UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations Alice Belkin Memorial Scholarship, 2021–2022
- UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship Program Award, 2021–2022
- UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program Award, 2021
- Law & Social Inquiry Graduate Student Paper Competition Winner, 2021
- American Sociological Association (ASA) Student Forum Paper Award, 2021
- Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) Doctoral Paper Award, 2021
- UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship Program Award, 2020–2021
- UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration Research Stipend, 2020
- UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Program Award, 2020
- Alternate & Honorable Mention, Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, 2020
- Yale Law School Benjamin Scharps Prize (best paper by a third-year law student), 2019
- Yale MacMillan Center Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses Summer Fellowship, 2018
- Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship, 2011
