Shaheen Sardar Ali is Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Peshawar, Pakistan and Reader, School of Law, University of Warwick, UK. Currently, she is Minister for Health, Population, Welfare and Women’s Development, Government of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. She is Chairperson of the National Commission on Women in Pakistan. She has an LLM and a PhD in international human rights law from the University of Hull, UK. Her areas of research and publication include Islamic law, gender issues, human rights and international law, minority rights and child rights. Her recent book, published by Kluwer Law International, is entitled Gender and Human Rights in Islam and International Law: Equal before Allah; Unequal before Man?.
Pauline Gardiner Barber is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, Women’s Studies and International Development Studies at Dalhousie University, Canada. Dr Gardiner Barber’s research explores issues of culture and political economy, expressed locally and in globalizing forms. Her published work discusses livelihoods, culture and class politics in industrial Cape Breton and the Philippines. She has been involved in gender and development projects in relation to sustainable livelihoods, primarily in the Philippines and Indonesia. She is currently researching the discursive and social class implications of Philippine gendered labour migration, transnationalism and diaspora. She is writing a monograph entitled: No/Maids: Silent Subjects of Philippine Migration.
Marella Bodur is currently a doctoral candidate and a sessional lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. She received her BA in English Language and Literature and her MA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. Her main research interests are gender and politics in the Middle East and the relationship between social movements, feminism and democracy. She is currently completing her dissertation on women’s movements and democracy in Turkey.
Vandana Desai is Lecturer in Development Studies at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is director for the Masters course on ‘The Geography of Third World Development’. She has carried out research on a wide spectrum of NGO activities. She is currently interested in the subtle strategies adopted by women to cope with global restructuring and the formation of informal networks and their impact on the dynamics of household relations. She has published Community Participation and Slum Housing: A Study of Bombay (1995) and the Companion to Development Studies (2001) (Arnold Publications).
Susan Franceschet currently teaches political science at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She recently received her PhD in Political Science from Carleton University. Her dissertation explores the changing patterns of women’s politics in Chile in the context of democratisation. She has published an article on this work in the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Josephine Lairap-Fonderson is currently a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Political Science. She is working on her PhD dissertation on ‘Micro credit and women’s empowerment in Kenya and Cameroon’.
Jane L. Parpart is Professor of History, International Development Studies and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University, Canada. She has had extensive experience with gender and development issues in Asia and Africa. Her primary interest is the connection between development theorizing, gender issues and development theory and practice, along with a long-standing interest in urban problems in Africa, particularly in regard to gender and class. She is currently working on a study of the middle class in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, especially notions of modernity, progress and development. She has published Feminism/Postmodernism/Development (Routledge, 1995) with coeditor, Marianne Marchand, and The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations (Westview, 1998) with co-editor, Marysia Zalewski.
Reena Patel is Lecturer at the School of Law, University of Warwick, UK. She teaches in the areas of gender and law, and comparative perspectives on gender, law and development. Her doctoral thesis explores women’s land rights in India, to be published as Legal Entitlements, Perceptions and Women’s Access to Land in Rural India (forthcoming). Her research interests lie within the area of gender, law and development.
Shirin M. Rai is Reader in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research interests are in the area of feminist politics, democratisation, globalisation and development studies. She has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and democratisation. Her relevant publications include (all as co-editor): Women in the Face of Change: Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China (Routledge, 1992); Women and the State (Taylor & Francis, 1996); and Global Social Movements (Macmillan, 2000). She has also written two books and several articles on Chinese politics. Her latest monograph is Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity Press, 2002). She is series editor (with Wyn Grant) for Perspectives on Democratization with Manchester University Press.
Lisa Ann Richey is Researcher at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen, Denmark. She was a post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard University where she carried out research in the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania, examining the relationship between gender, household wealth, meanings of modernity and perceptions and use of family planning. This research followed upon her PhD dissertation on family planning and population policy in Tanzania, received in 1999 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently researching comparative population issues in Uganda and Tanzania. She also teaches on the relationship between donor priorities, international discourse on gender and development, and local-level interventions in Africa at the Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University.
Kathleen Staudt is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is Faculty Co-ordinator for the Institute for Community-Based Teaching and Research, and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement. She is a scholar-activist, is involved in various community organisations (including cross-border organisations) and has published eleven books and many articles and chapters. These include, among others, Policy, Politics and Gender (Kumarian Press, 1998) and the edited collection Women, International Development and Politics: The Bureaucratic Mire (Temple, 1997).
Nelly P. Stromquist (PhD Stanford University) is Professor of International Development Education at the University of Southern California. She has considerable experience in formal and non-formal education, particularly in Latin America and West Africa. Her research interests focus on issues of gender equity, educational policies and practices and adult literacy – themes that she examines from a critical theory perspective. She has published widely; her most recent works include authoring Literacy for Citizenship: Gender and Grassroots in Brazil (SUNY, 1997), editing Women in the Third World: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Issues (Garland, 1998) and co-editing (with Michael Basile) Politics of Educational Innovations in Developing Countries (Garland, 1999).
Gillian Youngs is an international political economist and has taught in the UK and Hong Kong. She currently lectures at the Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester, UK. Her publications include International Relations in a Global Age: A Conceptual Challenge (Polity Press, 1999) and the edited collection Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspectives (Macmillan, 2000). She has published on concepts and theories of globalisation, feminist approaches to and women’s use of the Internet in international contexts, and linkages between technological and cultural processes. Her practice-based research has included involvement in the UNESCO/Society for International Development Women on the Net project. She is co-editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics and associate editor of Development.