Catherine L. Crooke
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.
Fields of Study
Law & Society, Sociology of Law, Refugee & Asylum Law, International Migration, Forced Migration, Ethnography, Qualitative Methods
Grants and Awards
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
Advisors
Cecilia Menjívar, Stefan Timmermans
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