dr. (Cathy) CA Wilcock

Profile

I am an interdisciplinary scholar with a specialist research profile in migration, transnationalism and peacebuilding. My fully-funded PhD -supervised by Prof Uma Kothari at the Global Development Institute - examined the role of conflict-generated diasporas in homeland peacebuilding. Following that, I stayed at Manchester to coordinate the University's Migration Lab before taking up a postdoc at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Here, I have worked across two projects: the NWO funded 'Migration and Human Security' with the Prince Claus Chair dr. Ali Bilgic and in the Vital Cities and Citizens: Migration and Diversity programme.

In my research, I am driven to understand the political lives of forced migrants. When people are forced to leave their homelands, their access to rights and their belonging to political community become diffused in a messy global network. I want to understand the social and political transformations brought about when forced migrants become ‘acting citizens’ in the face of their legal liminality and social exclusion. To this end, I bring conceptual frameworks in relational sociology to bear on the politics of migration. My empirical expertise is in out-migration from Sudan and Sudanese political development. This derives from seven years of extensive engagement with Sudanese communities in Europe, as well as fieldwork in Khartoum.