Dear RSF:

Please join us in the library at 11:00 on Wednesday, February 5, for Visiting Scholar Lisa Park’s seminar, “Medical Deportations: Hidden in Plain Sight.”

Park received both her MA and PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is currently Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies and Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Of her four published books, two have won Outstanding Book awards from the American Sociological Association—Slums of Aspen: Immigrants and the Environment in America’s Eden in 2014 and Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asia Immigrant Entrepreneurs in 2006.

Park is working on a monograph on medical deportations, or the involuntary removal of chronically ill or severely-injured immigrants to other nations to avoid the burden of health care costs. Using qualitative interviews and policy analysis, she is analyzing the historical and social contexts of this little known practice and exploring the implications for public health and immigration policy. Park is also studying how immigration advocates and the health care providers and administrators of hospitals and clinics that serve large numbers of low-income immigrant patients have responded to this phenomenon.