Dr. Meredith Van Natta is a researcher and professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on the intersections of citizenship and health, medicine, and technology.

Dr. Van Natta’s forthcoming book, Medical Legal Violence: Health Care and Immigration Enforcement Against Latinx Noncitizens, documents how Latinx immigrants made life and death decisions with their doctors and other clinic workers before and after the 2016 election. In this book, Dr. Van Natta’s ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews gathered in three states from 2015 to 2020 reveal how anti-immigrant laws are changing the way Latinx immigrants and their doctors weigh illness and injury against patients’ personal and family security. The book also evaluates the role of safety-net health care workers who have helped noncitizen patients navigate this unstable political landscape despite perceiving a rise in anti-immigrant surveillance in the health care spaces where they work. As anti-immigrant rhetoric intensifies, Medical Legal Violence sheds light on the real consequences of anti-immigrant laws on the health of Latinx noncitizens, and how these laws create a predictable humanitarian disaster in immigrant communities throughout the country and beyond its borders. Dr. Van Natta asks how things might be different if we begin to learn from this history rather than continuously repeat it.

In addition to her independent scholarship, Dr. Van Natta has participated in several interdisciplinary research collaborations. This work has been published in journals such as Social Science & Medicine; Sociology of Health and Illness; and Journal of Law and the Biosciences. Dr. Van Natta has also contributed to public-facing scholarship through blog posts to platforms such as The Regulatory Review and Contexts.

Dr. Van Natta also teaches and mentors at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She teaches courses in sociological theory, law and society, and medical sociology; and she has mentored students through UC Merced’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center (UROC), Duke University’s Science, Law, and Policy Lab (SLAPLAB), and through her various research projects. Dr. Van Natta received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, and previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Merced, and Duke University.