Catherine Crooke
PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA
Catherine’s doctoral research is a multiyear ethnographic study of asylum lawyers in Los Angeles—a major hub of immigration procedure—that examines how progressive legal advocates pursue justice within systems designed to constrain it. Because lawyers occupy a distinctive position between migrants and the state, studying their experiences offers an intimate, ground-level view of how migration control operates, enriching existing theories while revealing how legal systems reshape the professionals who navigate them. Her dissertation focuses on the politicization, bureaucratization, and hollowing out of the legal institutions people depend on for humanitarian protection, theorizing how increasingly restrictive migration policies reverberate inward to unsettle legal norms, transform professional practice, and destabilize institutional legitimacy. Rather than only examining how lawyers act upon migration processes (the focus of much existing scholarship), she also accounts for how those processes act upon lawyers, ultimately advancing a broader framework for understanding how professionals sustain commitments to justice amid institutional erosion—and illuminating both the fragility and endurance of law as a site of moral and political action.