Avantika Singh Awarded for Human Rights Day Symposium Poster Presentation

First-year PhD student Avantika Singh came into the political science program with two master's degrees: one in International Human Rights from the University of Denver and a second in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras. Between her master's programs, she worked for a year with the United Nations International Organization for Migration in Papua New Guinea and with the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development to monitor and report on human rights violations across seven South Asian countries. As a part of this work, Avantika documented the Taliban's takeover in Afghanistan in 2021. For her PhD, she is focusing on international relations and political models and methodologies.

Avantika's mentor at the University of Denver, Dr. Marie Berry, strongly encouraged her to consider the University of Minnesota, and the political science department was a great fit for her research interests. She was particularly excited for the opportunity to work with political science faculty such as Tanisha Fazal, Helen Kinsella, and Anoop Sarbahi, as well as Carrie Booth Walling, the Director of the Human Rights Program. Avantika also spoke with Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Interim Director Joe Eggers before committing. "Those conversations," she reflected, "further convinced me that important work was happening here."

Recognizing reproductive violence

The Human Rights Program recently hosted their annual Human Rights Day Symposium, bringing together the human rights community, faculty, and students to explore the progress, challenges, and future of the human rights movement. The symposium included a poster session with presentations of student work, for which Avantika presented her poster titled "Reproductive Violence as Genocidal Harm: The Case for Distinct Framework."

The project began as a paper for her master's thesis. Some of the data for the Gaza case study included in the poster came from a webinar Avantika hosted, where doctors and medial practitioners working in Gaza discussed the conditions they were witnessing and the critical importance of their work. "Hearing their firsthand accounts on the destruction of obstetric care made clear how systematically reproductive harm was being inflicted and how poorly existing frameworks capture this violence."

In the project, Avantika argues for recognizing reproductive violence as a distinct conceptual and legal form of harm within genocidal contexts. "Current international atrocity prevention and human rights frameworks tend to subsume reproductive violence under sexual and gender-based violence or serious bodily harm," she explained. This "fails to fully capture both the violation of reproductive autonomy and the collective, group-directed nature of this harm."

Through an examination of forced sterilizations of Uyghur women in China and the systematic destruction of maternal and neonatal care in Gaza, Avantika was able to show that reproductive violence is severe, urgent, and deeply contemporary. Although the focus of her analysis is on genocide, the implications extend far, as this form of violence has been inflicted on Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities for a long time, in ways that are often normalized or rendered invisible.

Potential to develop further

The opportunity to present this research at the symposium was both a "unique and rewarding experience." To Avantika, it was valuable to engage with a diverse audience, answer questions, and learn what others did and did not already know about reproductive violence. The conversations she was able to have helped her think about how this research should be communicated beyond an academic audience.

For her presentation, Avantika was awarded first place in the PhD category, which came with a cash prize. "The award is both affirming and practical" to Avantika. "It gives me the resources and motivation to continue developing this project and present a more complete and refined version of the research in the future." Avantika would not have been able to complete this version of the project without the support of Dr. Marie Berry, who was her supervisor and guide for this project.

As Avantika continues in her PhD, she hopes to focus on spatiality, structural violence, and political violence. While remaining critical of it, she finds the genocide framework intellectually compelling. Her broader goal is to interrogate how violence is structured, normalized, and rendered invisible, particularly through spatial and political processes.