PhD candidate Lindsey Allemang Goldberg was chosen by the Office of the Vice President for Research to be highlighted in this year’s Dare to Discover campaign. Each year, Dare to Discover selects researchers and scholars from across the university to feature on their website as well as on banners located in downtown Iowa City. Researchers featured this year have made important contributions towards the understanding of global health disparities, farmland biodiversity, online radicalization, vaccination barriers, and many other topics in fields from the sciences and the humanities.
Lindsey’s research explores attitudes toward pregnancy within armed rebel movements. Her dissertation, titled “Gender and Reproductive Violence in Armed Rebellion,” addresses women’s experiences with reproductive violence in rebel movements by introducing an original dataset on the perpetration of forced abortions and forced pregnancies across over 300 rebel movements active between 1946 and 2020. Lindsey uses the Reproductive Violence in Armed Rebellion Dataset (RVARD) to statistically analyze the relationship between a rebel movement’s ideological commitments regarding gender roles and the perpetration of reproductive violence within the group and finds that rebel movements that are ideologically committed to equal gender roles, such as the FARC, are more likely to perpetrate forced abortions against women in their ranks, while rebel movements that are ideologically committed to patriarchal gender roles, such as Boko Haram, are more likely to perpetrate forced pregnancies. Women’s experiences with reproductive violence in rebel movements remain underexplored or conflated with other examples of wartime sexual violence in the field of IR, yet the standpoint of female rebels’ challenges victim/perpetrator dichotomies, rendering the experiences of more people and different types of violence visible. Lindsey’s work demonstrates the importance of looking to women’s experiences within armed rebel movements to better understand the breadth of wartime sexual violence and its political implications.
"I feel honored to be featured in the university’s Dare to Discover campaign. Reading about the research other students featured in this campaign are conducting makes me feel proud to be listed among them. Global health disparities, mental health care for children, biases in standardized testing – there is so much amazing research underway across this campus! This campaign is an exciting reminder that students across all levels and disciplines are capable of producing truly creative, innovative, and important work."
Lindsey plans to defend her dissertation this summer before she heads with her husband, Michael, and dog, Booger, to the University of Florida, where she will begin the fall semester as an Assistant Professor of International Relations, specializing in feminist IR. Her first two classes will be: “Gender and IR,” an introduction to feminist international relations, its history, and influence on topics such as global conflict, human rights and political economy; and “Conflict, Gender and Data,” focusing on conflict-related data through a gender analytic lens.
"I’m thrilled to start my new job at the University of Florida this fall! The transition from graduate student to assistant professor will be a challenge, and I will greatly miss Iowa City and everyone from our department. Thankfully, my new department at UF has already made me feel welcomed, and I’m eager to get in the classroom with their students and begin developing my dissertation into my first book. For both of these big accomplishments, I am extremely grateful to my advisor, Brian Lai. His endless support, compassion, and encouragement through the highs and the lows of my journey through the Ph.D. program are the not-so-secret ingredients to my success. I feel lucky to be part of a department with mentors, colleagues, and friends who are so eager to celebrate one another’s victories."
