Participants

Dorothy Aken'Ova is Executive Director of the International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights (INCRESE), an NGO that provides sexual health and rights services for vulnerable populations. INCRESE addresses sexual heath needs among young people, supports women in opposing discriminatory sentences for alleged sexual offenses under Sharia law, and works to bring visibility to and resolution of LGBTQ issues.

Radhika Balakrishnan is Professor of Economics and International Studies at Marymount Manhattan College. She has worked at the Ford Foundation as a program officer in the Asia Regional Program. She is currently on the board of Women's Edge Coalition, and is the Chair of the Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Network on Human Rights. She was the Chair of the Board of the Religious Consultation for Reproductive Health, Population and Ethics, and was also on the board of the International Association of Feminist Economics. She is currently working on a project trying to use human rights norms to evaluate and construct macroeconomic policy.

Suzanne Bergeron is Director of Women's and Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Michigan Dearborn, and is also a research affiliate at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She is the author of Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender and the Space of Modernity, and does research on the intersections of gender, sexuality and colonial location in economic development policy discourse.

Jon Binnie, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, is author of The Globalization of Sexuality (Sage, 2004), and co-author of The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond (Polity, 2000).

Ann Cammett is a Founding Board Member of Queers for Economic Justice. She is Teaching Fellow, Georgetown University Law Center, Domestic Violence Clinic, where she currently works on the intersection of intrafamily violence and criminal justice issues.

Davina Cooper, Professor Of Law, University of Kent and Director of Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, is author of several books and articles on sexuality, law and policy including Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (CUP, 2004) and Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (Rivers Oram/ NYU, 1998).

Lisa Duggan is the author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon). She teaches queer studies in the American studies program and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU.

Mary Margaret Fonow, Professor and Director of the Women's Studies at Arizona State University, researches union networks to mobilize women's participation in transnational campaigns for labor rights and economic justice and recently co-wrote a paper highlighting the connections between transnational queer activism and labor advocacy. She will be a plenary speaker at the Conference on Women and Globalization being held at the Center for Global Justice in San Miguel, Mexico.

Claudia Hinojosa, cofounder in 1978 of the Grupo Lambda, one of the first visible lesbian/gay groups in Mexico City and in Latin America. She was one of the first public voices of the lesbian feminist movement in Mexico. From 1995-2000 she collaborated with the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers on a project on the politics of language and translation in cross-cultural organizing for women's human rights.

Josephine Ho, Professor and Coordinator, Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan, is an activist for sexual rights and freedom of speech. In 2003 she successfully fought a lawsuit aiming to shut down her academic website, charging her with "obscenity."

Kamala Kempadoo, Interim Director, Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought Associate Professor, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, York University. Her work includes, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor (Routledge, 2004); and Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), and (with Jo Doezema) Global Sex Workers (Routledge, 1998).

Naomi Klein, is author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, co-producer of "The Take," and an activist for economic justice.

Gabrielle Le Roux is a feminist cultural activist with a particular interest in the intersection of sexuality and social justice. She is also a portrait artist who does portraits from life as a way of paying tribute to people who are doing brave and exciting work that is not sufficiently recognised.

Irene León, member of the Board of Directors of Agencia Latinoamericana de Información and Director of its Women's Program, is also former coordinator of the Forum of the Americas for Diversity and Pluralism, a preparatory space of NGOs of the region for the World Conference Against Racism, and editor of several books on gender issues, globalization, and resistance in Latin America including Retos Feministas en un Mundo Globalizado (Porto Alregre, 2002); Mujeres en Resistencia (Quito, 2005) and Mujeres Contra el ALCA (Quito). She has also published extensively on the World Social Forum, in which she has been actively engaged.

Njoki Njoroge Njehu is a Kenyan national who worked with women's groups and the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya for over a decade. She grew up learning from the work of Kenyan women, especially her mother, Lilian Njehû, a grassroots and community activist. Before joining the 50 Years Is Enough Network she worked at Greenpeace International for three years focusing on the international toxic trade and on biodiversity and oceans issues. She joined the 50 Years Is Enough Network in July 1996 and was named director in October 1998. She is a founding member of the International Coordinating Council of the World Social Forum and the Africa Social Forum. Njoki also works with Solidarity Africa: Network In Action.

Rhacel Salazer Parreñas, Full Professor, Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis, is author of Servants of Globalization (Stanford, 2001) and researches gender, migration, family formation, and caring labor.

Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Economic and Medical Anthropologist, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Health and Social Justice, has research, teaching and training experience across eleven African countries extending over twenty-seven years, and has also worked as a consultant and trainer for NGOs on HIV/AIDS issues.

Stephanie Seguino is an associate professor and chair of the Economics Department at the University of Vermont. Her research interests include macroeconomics, gender, and development; income distribution; effects of globalization on gender inequality; and determinants of well-being. She has collaborated with the AFL-CIO, United Nations, and United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in this work. She has also worked in Haiti for the U.S. Agency for International Development, researching the effect of export taxes on coffee farmers.

Svati Shah, Ph.D. is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at Wellesley College. She completed her Ph.D. in Columbia University's joint anthropology and public health program in 2006. She has previously taught at Hunter College, Marymount Manhattan College, and New York University. Her dissertation research focused on migration and sex work among day wage workers in the city of Mumbai. She has published in a range of scholarly and progressive journals, including Gender and History, Cultural Dynamics, Rethinking Marxism, and SAMAR: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection. She is currently working on a book on sex work and migration in Mumbai's informal sector. In addition to her academic work, she has been involved with progressive, LGBT and feminist grassroots organizations in the U.S. and in India, and works as a research consultant to foundations and non-governmental organizations.

Anna Marie Smith, Associate Professor of Government, Cornell University, teaches and conducts research in the field of political theory. She is particularly interested in studying theoretical approaches to the regulation of sexuality; feminist legal theory and feminist theory in general; critical race theory; ideology and discourse analysis; social theories of identity and power relations; and Marxist and post-Marxist theory. She is the author Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (Routledge, 1998) and New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and has a forthcoming book on welfare and sexual regulation.

Ara Wilson is Director of the Program in the Study of Sexualities and Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she is the author of The Intimate Economies of Bangkok (California, 2004) and has conducted research on sexual and feminist politics at UN meetings, NGOs, and the World Social Forum. She is currently working on a book, Sexual Latitudes: The Erotic Politics of Globalization.