In This Story
Carol Cleavland and Michele Waslin have been awarded the 2025 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Award in the category of Applied Psychology and Social Work by the Association of American Publishers. PROSE Awards celebrate authors, editors, and publishers whose landmark works have made significant advancements in their fields of study.
Their book, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum, details stories of Latin American women seeking asylum from violence and advocates for improvements to the immigration system.
“The asylum system has limited utility for many women who are desperate for safety because of gender-based violence. The system was designed to protect survivors of state persecution, but now there are many women needing protection because the countries they fled were either unwilling or unable to protect them. My hope is that the recognition we received for this work will broaden the scope of people's understanding of asylum, including why so many women crossed the border without authorization to seek this protection,” said Cleaveland.
Cleaveland is an associate professor in the Department of Social Work. Since 2004, she has conducted extensive research on Latino immigration and anti-immigrant policy. Waslin is an affiliate faculty member at George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research and the Assistant Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.
Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum by Cleaveland and Waslin was published by New York University Press in October 2024.