Christina Kaufmann
SJD Candidate
Christina Kaufmann graduated from Washington College of Law with an LL.M. in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in May 2018 (with additional graduate schooling through American University in international education, youth and armed conflict, and qualitative research methods). Before moving to Washington, DC, she taught English to refugee adults, undocumented workers, and nonimmigrant professionals in Michigan. She worked in early childhood education for migrant farmworker children and special education within impoverished urban areas. Christina has also worked as a union researcher, an apprentice electrician, an auto assembler, a labor law clerk, an intake coordinator for a legal service agency, and an interviewer of artisans for her first master’s thesis.
During her LL.M. studies, Christina developed a capstone research project about Afghan protracted displacement, conducted a focus group interview of Panamanian teachers, and designed a proposal based on her participation in a legal team monitoring elections in Bolivia. While interning for the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights in 2017, she drafted Spanish and English presentations and petitions for a Special Rapporteur and for the Commissioners. In early 2018, she participated as a WCL student delegate to Jordan with the International Refugee Assistance Project, she met with diplomats about durable solutions for protracted displacement, with refugees about their hopes for the future, and with aid workers about available legal protections. She also researched UNHCR policies on LGBTQ asylum seekers in Nepal and US Special Immigrant Visa procedures for Afghans.
At the end of 2018, Christina traveled to the Casa Monarca migrant shelter in northern Mexico to volunteer with the delivery of food to migrants awaiting northbound trains, the receipt of Mexican deportees at the shelter, and to live with victims of human trafficking petitioning for humanitarian visas from the Mexican government. Subsequently, she relocated to El Paso, TX in 2021 and San Diego, CA in 2022 to work with refugees and asylum-seekers at the US-Mexican border, volunteer with migrant shelters and service-providers, and to continue teaching ESL and US Citizenship. She loves teaching, in particular, as an opportunity to empower students with the strength and confidence to express themselves and to advocate for each other. In 2022, she attended Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, earning a certificate of completion in Forced Migration.
Christina strongly believes in creating conditions where refugees are empowered to develop, articulate, and assert their rights as much as possible on their own, without the extensive interference of government and humanitarian professionals. She also fully supports educating the public about the social realities and political rights of refugees. Through her current SJD research on video communication of International Refugee Law, she hopes to shed light on how limited access to policy discourse and legal information both curtails the agency and inclusion of refugees and sidelines the general public. As growing numbers of people are driven into cross-border flight, internal displacement, and statelessness, such scholarship is increasingly relevant and critical.
WORKING TITLE OF DISSERTATION
- Video Communication of International Refugee Law
Candidate's academic and professional affiliations
- American Society of International Law
- TESOL International Association
- National Lawyers Guild
- Society for International Development
- Working title of dissertation:
- International Criminal Liability for Refoulement
Fields of study
- International Refugee Law
- Adult Education
- Sociolinguistics
- Refugee Protection
- International Development
- International Human Rights Law
- International Humanitarian Law
- English Education
Higher Education Credentials
- Bachelor of Arts, Labor Studies, Wayne State University, 1998
- Juris Doctor, Wayne State University, 2003
- Master of Liberal Arts, University of North Carolina, 2006
- Legum Magister, International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Washington College of Law, 2018