2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant Awardees Announced

We've awarded the Human Rights Summer Research Grant to eight outstanding students this year! These students will receive up to $2,000 each to support their student-driven research projects this summer. Each research project has a significant human rights focus.  

These students will be sharing an inside look into their experiences through blog posts, which will be featured on the Duke Human Rights Blog throughout the summer and fall! Here's a sneak peek...

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Jungwon Kim will spend three weeks in central Vietnam studying how local Vietnamese communities remember massacres committed by South Korean troops during the American War in Vietnam and how these memories persist despite limited recognition in South Korean public discourse. 

Katelyn Zeser will conduct fieldwork on the ways American evangelicals see technology as a way of furthering their goals for the Middle East and enhancing their religious efficacy generally.

Lei He will be traveling to Inner Mongolia to investigate how global demand for rare earth elements is experienced through the body and in everyday life, asking who bears the cost of technological advancement and energy transition, and whose lives remain invisible within these narratives. 

Nikki Tora will be working in Pennsylvania to examine how advocacy organizations respond to concerns raised by incarcerated individuals and whether those responses function as meaningful mechanisms of accountability within prison systems.

Nilay Ghodasara will visit Maine, New Hampshire, and North Carolina to investigate how variation in voter verification policy across U.S. states shapes voter participation and public confidence in election integrity, with particular attention to whether these policies may impose constraints on the exercise of the right to vote. 

Phoenix Chapital will spend the summer examining how burial practices in New Orleans reflect and reproduce racial and economic inequality, particularly for low-income Black communities.

Sang Chi Liu will be in Taiwan studying how predictive technologies reshape care labor, ethical responsibility, and vulnerability through an ethnographic study of Fortune Booth Studio, a feminist and LGBTQ‑friendly I Ching divination collective operating primarily through text‑based communication.

Yiwa Deng will study how Western museum display practices systematically rewrite the identity, relational meaning, and spatial significance of displaced Chinese cultural objects.