Melina Singh

Melina Singh’s interdisciplinary scholarship examines the regulation and criminalization of pregnancy and motherhood within healthcare and safety net programs. She is a qualitative researcher who is interested in understanding how racism, sexism, and classism are reflected in laws, policies, and institutional practices that disproportionately impact low-income women and mothers (e.g., child welfare, criminal justice, cash assistance, domestic violence), with a particular focus on women of color. Her courses include Psychology of Women and Gender, Social Psychology, Directed Research, and upper-level seminars in qualitative methods and reproductive justice. 

Education

B.A. in Criminology, Law & Society; Psychology & Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine

Ph.D. in Psychology, emphasis in Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Selected Publications 

Singh, M.R. (in press). Institutionalized surveillance and policing of women’s bodies. In H.E. Bullock & E. L. Zurbriggen (Eds.), The handbook of feminist political psychology. DeGruyter.

Sun, M., Singh, M. R., & Stevenson, M. (under review). The hospital-to-prison pipeline: Pregnancy as pretext for surveillance of marginalized patients. In M. K. Miller, D. DeMatteo, & D. Kraus (Eds.), Advances in Psychology and Law. Springer Nature.

Bullock, H.E. & Singh, M.R. (2023). Toward an intersectional understanding of gender, power, and poverty. In E. L. Zurbriggen and R. Capdevila (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of power, gender, and psychology (pp. 151-172). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41531-9_10

Bullock, H.E., Reppond, H.A., Truong, S.V., & Singh, M.R. (2020). An intersectional analysis of the feminization of homelessness and mothers’ housing precarity. Journal of Social Issues, 76, 835-858. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12406

Singh, M.R. & Bullock, H.E. (2020). An intersectional analysis of newspaper portrayals of the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 6, 344-355. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000255