Kathryn Libal, Ph.D.

Professor, Social Work and Human Rights Institute

Kathryn Libal is professor of social work and human rights at the University of Connecticut and former director of the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute. Her research interests include community sponsorship of refugees, human rights of asylum seekers and refugees, localization of human rights, critical discourse analysis, immigrant rights, and dialogue for social change.

For more than two decades, Dr. Libal has focused her work on the localization of human rights norms in the United States, human rights and social work, and voluntarism and refugee resettlement in the United States, Canada, and the Middle East. Currently, she’s examining how voluntarism in an era of xenophobia and backlash creates new forms of civic connection and political participation. She draws upon ethnography and critical discourse analysis in her research.

Dr. Libal has co-edited several contributory volumes, including the most recent book, Beyond Borders: The Human Rights of Noncitizens at Home and Abroad (Cambridge, 2021). Her scholarship appears in more than 65 peer-reviewed publications including Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Journal of Human Rights and Social Work.

Dr. Libal teaches at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. She teaches courses on social welfare policy, human rights and social work, qualitative research methods, and social work practice with immigrants and refugees.

At UConn, she’s a liaison with for the Scholars at Risk Program and Welcome Corps on Campus, and is lead organizer of a national scholar-practitioner body called the Refugee Resettlement Research Working Group. Most recently, she co-chairs the Forced Migration Hub and founded and is co-chair of the Welcome Quilt Collective which provides training to those who want to learn to sew and share quilts with new Americans and their families.

Dr. Libal joined the University of Connecticut in 2004 and the School of Social Work in 2007. She completed her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Washington, focusing on the emergence of children’s rights mobilization and child welfare in Turkey.

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