CONFERENCE DISCUSSANTS

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Global Feminisms: The Role of Women in Building
States and Societies An International Conference

Kawango Agot (Researcher, University of Nairobi, Kenya, Social Geography)—Culture, Widow Inheritance, and HIV Interventions. Dr. Agot is Project Coordinator and Co-Investigator of a study investigating the association between male circumcision and HIV infection among young men in Kisumu, Kenya. She has served a Principal Investigator (P.I.) for several studies, including the association between HIV infection and the cultural practice of widow inheritance (funded by the USA National Institutes of Health, NIH), the promotion of voluntary HIV counseling and testing among the youth (Social Science Research Council), behavioral dis inhibition associated with male circumcision (NIH), empowering HIV positive widows (Fulbright New Century Scholar 2004-05), among others. She is the Director of IMPACT, a local research and development NGO, and the P.I. of the Tuungane Project, a large PEPFAR-funded program on youth HIV prevention, STI treatment and HIV/AIDS care (2004-2010). Agot has consulted for social science studies and clinical trials in Nyanza Province, Kenya.

Nicola Gavey (Associate Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Psychology)—Rape and the politics of Trauma. Gavey’s research and teaching interests broadly focus on the intersections of gender, power, and sexuality. In particular, she is interested in critically examining the cultural supports for rape and heterosexual coercion within Western societies. Her book Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape ( London, 2005) brings together her work in this area. Last year, as a 2004-5 Fulbright New Century Scholar she was based for 3 months at the Victims of Violence program, affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, MA. Her current research is concerned with contemporary understandings of the impact of rape, the politics of trauma, and ways of stopping sexual violence against women. In recent years she has also collaborated on a project investigating the sociocultural implications of Viagra.

Pregaluxmi Govender (Writer, Scholar, and Activist, South Africa, gender and civil rights scholar and activist)—Power, politics and sexuality during South Africa’s first decade of democracy. Ms. Govender has been an activist for 30 years, receiving several local and international awards for her writing and activism. She writes an editorial page column for South Africa’s largest weekly, the Sunday Times . She helped conceptualize the Women’s Charter campaign, which mobilized 2 million women to influence South Africa’s Constitution. From 1994 to May 2002, she served as an African National Congress (ANC) Member of Parliament, where she served as Chair of the Joint Monitoring Committee on the Quality of Life and Status of Women, convened the Finance Committee’s Gender Group, and chaired Parliament’s Committee on Women. In the 2004 study “Gender in Southern African Politics: Ringing up the Changes” (C. L. Morna ed) she is credited with “driving one of the most remarkable gender justice reform agendas to have taken place in such a short period of time.” She initiated South Africa’s ‘Women’s Budget’ and helped influence the 1998-1999 National Budget. She resigned in 2002, after being the only MP to register her opposition to the arms deal in the Budget vote. She chaired hearings and wrote an influential report on HIV/AIDS. Today she builds women’s leadership in politics based on love and courage.

Vesna Kesic (Journalist, Center for Women War Victims, Zagreb, Croatia, Sociology)—Politics of Remembering and Forgetting Gender Violence in Post-Conflict. Kesic has been a professional journalist and editor in various Croatian and Yugoslav newspapers and magazines. She is a Research Coordinator at the Center for Women War Victims. Her research focuses on women’s memory on resistance to wars and nationalisms in the countries of former Yugoslavia. Her main research interest is in the intersection between gender and ethnic identities, its impact on the war violence against women, the effects on women of the transition processes, locally and globally, and in the gender dimension of public memory and the politics of memory. She is a founder and co-founder of several major Croatian NGOs, including The Center for Women War Victims, Women’s Human Rights Group B.a.B.e. (Be active, Be emancipated).

Mona Lena Krook (Department of Political Science/Women and Gender Studies Program, Washington University, St. Louis, USA)—Women and Political Representation in Government. Krook is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Women and Gender Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled Politicizing Representation: Campaigns for Candidate Gender Quotas Worldwide , which develops a framework for analyzing the adoption and implementation of quotas for the selection of female candidates to political office. She has also written several articles that explore the global diffusion of gender quotas, the normative dimensions of quota reform, and the broader significance of quota policies to existing political processes, including links between the descriptive and substantive representation of women. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in British Politics , the European Journal of Political Research , European Political Science , and Politics and Gender , as well as in Women, Quotas, and Politics , edited by Drude Dahlerup (Routledge, 2006).

Lakshmi Lingam (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, Health Sociology)—Gender, Poverty and Structural Adjustment. Lingam is a Professor in the Women’s Studies Unit, at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai , India . She has been teaching courses on Gender and Health to Masters students of Social Work and Health Administration at the Institute. In addition, she serves on the Curriculum Advisory Boards of several Women’s Studies Departments in Indian universities and on Technical and Ethical Advisory Boards of a number of NGOs. She was the General Secretary of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies for the period 2000-2002. She has edited a widely used textbook entitled Understanding Women’s Health Issues: A Reader (1988) and is working on a project entitled “Micro-credit Programs and Women’s Empowerment.”

Maria (Titia) Loenen (Professor Doctor, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, Gender and Law)—Gender, multiculturalism and human rights in a comparative and international perspective. Loenen’s early work dealt with equality and non-discrimination law in the United States and the Netherlands. Her current research focuses on human rights, especially equality and non-discrimination, and on gender and multicultural issues. It takes a clear international and comparative interest and has brought her as a Fulbright visiting scholar to New York University Law School (Fall 1990), as a visiting lecturer to the University of the Western Cape (South Africa, Fall1995) and as Parsons Visiting Scholar to Sydney University Law School (September 2001). Loenen is co-editor of the Dutch journal of human rights, the NJCM-Bulletin , member of the editorial board of the South-African Democracy and Development Journal , and member of the international advisory board of the AHRB Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, a cooperative program among the universities of Keele, Westminster, and Kent in the UK.

Monica Maher (Lecturer, Union Theological Seminary, New York City, USA, Theology)—Gender Violence and Religion as a Source of Women’s Empowerment. Maher has served as United Nations Non-Governmental Representative to the International Grail. As a long-time women’s rights activist, popular educator and consultant in Latin America, including seven years living in Central America and the Caribbean, Maher has worked extensively with women’s groups as a consultant and program coordinator. She is a specialist in religion and women’s rights. Her present research focus is on religion as a resource for combating gender-based violence.

Julissa Mantilla (Professor, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru, Law)—Sexual Violence and Post-conflict Truth Commissions. Mantilla’s interests are international human rights law, gender issues, human rights of women and the comparative study of cases of sexual violence against women, especially during armed conflict. She has researched cases of forced sterilization against Peruvian women. She has served as a consultant and research fellow in various capacities, including the Peruvian Representative for the International Development Bank Delegation at the Fourth Women’s International Conference and NGO Forum; a Junior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center where she developed the research Human Rights in the USA Foreign Policy: The Peruvian Case , a Peruvian Ombudsman Office for Human Rights; a member of the legal team of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR). In 2003, she was a consultant for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia and the Women and Armed Conflict Board, developing techniques of documenting cases on violence against women. She has also been a speaker in international conferences and workshops organized by institutions including the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies (University of York, Canada); Justice Studies Center of the Americas (CEJA, Chile); American Women in Development (AWID, México); Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISJ, Spain); General Prosecutor, National University and the Institute of Studies of the National Prosecutor of Colombia; Corporación La Morada and Institute of Women (Chile); International Bar Association (IBA, Panamá).

Rhoda Reddock (University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago, Sociology)—Gender and diversity in inter-ethnic conflict. Reddock is Professor and head of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus. She has written about masculinity, is an activist in the Caribbean Women’s movement and founding member of the Caribbean Association or Feminist Research and Action. She is an activist in the Caribbean Women’s movement and founding member and first chair of the Caribbean Association or Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA). A former chair of Research Committee 32 (Women and Society) of the International Sociological Association (1994-1998), she has numerous publications including Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History (1994), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 1995, Plantation Women: International Experiences (1998), co- edited with Shobhita Jain, Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings edited with Christine Barrow (2000), and the edited collection Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities (2004). She is currently visiting professor at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Rachel Silvey ( University of Colorado, USA, Social Geography)—Gender, Networks, and Transnational Islam. Silvey is Assistant Professor of Geography and Research Associate at the Population Program, Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research is concerned with migration, feminist theory, critical development studies, and the politics of transnationalism in the context of Indonesia. Through extended ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia ( West Java and South Sulawesi), she examines the substantive and theoretical dimensions of gender politics as these are tied to spatial mobility. She is interested in the production of social difference among national and transnational migrant labor from Indonesia, and in understanding how the internationalization of Indonesian migration is reorganizing the geography of migrants’ rights and identities. Her work analyzes the grounded spatial practices of low-income workers in Indonesia’s New Order (1966-1998) period and the current political and economic reform period (1998 present). Through this work she aims to illustrate the empirical ramifications for migrants of the neoliberal orientation of economic development in Indonesia, and also to elaborate the implications of these findings for theorizing the changing geographies of gender and migration.