Biography

Catherine Ho (she/her) grew up in Louisville, KY (Shawnee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw land). Prior to coming to this program, she studied Neuroscience and Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard College. She is currently interested in questions of family, refuge(e), legibility, abolition, and the possibilities and limitations of legal advocacy. Her MA thesis explores the vexxed appeals to family and kinship in Southeast Asian refugee anti-deportation advocacy. What are we to make of a strategy that may gesture toward other kinship formations that cannot be contained and co-opted by the state but also may uphold fundamentally anti-abolitionist and anti-Black notions of deservingness? At its core, the project asks how deportation, a fundamentally state-facing procedure, forces us to consider less violent and more liberating modes of engagement with power and with each other. Catherine also loves hiking, kayaking, baking, watching Vietnamese comedy, and perusing the aisles of Costco!