Catherine Ruth Craven is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham, where she works on the ESRC-funded project MIGZEN - Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit. Catherine’s research focuses on migration and diaspora governance, particularly, how states engage with and discipline their emigrant populations, and the global and local power relations that such governance is embedded within. Most recently, she has been exploring the global historical entanglements that underlie many contemporary migration governance and bordering practices.
Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, Catherine was a research assistant at SOAS University of London on the EU Horizon2020 project MAGYC (Migration Governance and Asylum Crises), where she conducted comparative research on the Kurdish diaspora and refugee experience in EU member states. She has also held research positions at the Otto-Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin, the Sigur Centre for Asian Studies at George Washington University in DC, York University’s Centre for Asian Research, as well as at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.
Her PhD research (funded by the ESRC), which she completed in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, was a multi-sited ethnographic study of diaspora governance practices examined through the lens of Tamil communities in Toronto, London, and Geneva. Her research has been published in Global Networks.