Yoosun Park
Yoosun Park, PhD, MSW, is an Associate Professor at University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice, where she serves as the director of the Social Justice Scholars Program. Dr. Park’s scholarship and pedagogy are predicated on the belief that social work’s commitment to social justice requires not only a diversity of social identities but of perspective on and approach to knowledge-building. To this end, she has built an interdisciplinary and non-traditional body of scholarship that utilizes critical theories and methodologies to significantly extend the borders of social work knowledge. Framed within the broad substantive area of critical discourse studies, she has pursued two distinct but overlapping lines of inquiry that interrogate and elucidate each other: 1) an interrogation of social work’s history with racialized populations (particularly immigrants and immigration) and the processes of racialization; and 2) the study of the ways in which that history manifests in social work research, education, and practice today. As required readings in a variety of courses across schools of social work in the United States and abroad, Dr. Park’s scholarship informs the education of the next generation of social work practitioners.
Dr. Park’s 2019 book, Facilitating injustice: The complicity of social workers in the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941–1946, published by Oxford University Press, analyzed the role of social workers in the removal, incarceration, and resettlement of Japanese Americans during World War Two. The book and the journal articles that it grew out of, remain the only scholarship to address social work’s involvement in this ignominious history, and remain the only works of history ever awarded recognition by the Society for Social Work Research, the discipline’s main research organization. Her second book,“To elevate, humanize, Christianize, Americanize”: Social Work, white supremacy, and the Americanization Movement, 1880–1930, is scheduled to be published by Routledge in 2023. It will be the first comprehensive examination of the participation of social work and social workers in the movement that continues shape the nation and the profession’s approach to immigrants and racialized Others today. An article presenting the preliminary data from this study was published in late 2022 in Social Service Review, the premier social work journal, and garnered its Frank R. Breul Memorial Award, awarded annually for the best article published during the year.
Dr. Park’s service to the profession has included four years as Editor-in-Chief of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, social work’s only feminist journal. She currently serves as a board member of its advisory board. Dr. Park also serves on the external review board of Social Service Review and advisory committee for the Council on Social Work Education’s Center for Diversity and Social & Economic Justice. She is a fellow of the Society for Social Work Research.