Professor Meredith Van Natta has been awarded a 2024 Outstanding Scholarship Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) Division of Health, Health Policy, and Health Services. The Division highlighted her impressive work and contributions to the field:
Dr. Van Natta’s scholarship on “medical legal violence” includes her recently published book, Medical Legal Violence: Health Care and Immigration Enforcement Against Latinx Noncitizens (NYU Press 2023), as well as her related articles on this topic in Social Science & Medicine and Law & Society Review.
“Medical legal violence” refers to the incursion of antiimmigrant laws into healthcare institutions in ways that disproportionately surveil and penalize immigrants of color as they seek health care, and it also enrolls healthcare workers as either agents or targets of that violence.
Through clinic ethnography and in-depth interviews in three states from 2015 to 2020, Dr. Van Natta examined how anti-immigrant laws grounded in racial capitalism have altered how Latinx immigrants and clinic workers weigh illness and injury against patients’ personal and family security. Dr. Van Natta also revealed how clinic workers have actively resisted the perceived incursion of immigration enforcement surveillance into healthcare spaces through various strategies that engage their unique positionality. While Dr. Van Natta has focused primarily on the empirical case of citizen-based healthcare stratifications, the concept of medical legal violence also carries important implications for other contexts of contested, politicized health care. For example, as suggested in her Law & Society Review article, policies that deny vital gender-affirming and reproductive health care in the United States similarly compromise the health and safety of targeted communities while enlisting healthcare institutions and personnel in sometimes unexpected surveillance and enforcement efforts.
Congratulations!
