York University, also known as YorkU or simply YU, is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, and it has approximately 55,700 students, 7,000 faculty and staff, and over 325,000 alumni worldwide. It has 11 faculties, including the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, Faculty of Science, Lassonde School of Engineering, Schulich School of Business, Osgoode Hall Law School, Glendon College, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Health, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty of Graduate Studies, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, and 28 research centres.
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith is also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
Lillian Allen is a Canadian dub poet, reggae musician, writer and Juno Award winner.
Amy Ashwood Garvey was a Jamaican Pan-Africanist activist. She was a director of the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, and along with her former husband Marcus Garvey she founded the Negro World newspaper.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Michèle Pujol, born in Madaoua, Niger, was a French intellectual, feminist, economist, scholar and human rights activist who lived in British Columbia, Canada. She was an assistant professor at the University of Victoria Department of Women's Studies and held the chair at the University of Manitoba. She was a significant feminist economic scholar and an advocate of social justice.
Louisa Calio is an American poet, writer, multimedia performance artist and teacher. She has directed the Poets and Writers' Piazza for Hofstra University's Italian Experience for the past 10 years. Calio's writings have appeared internationally in anthologies, magazines and journals. She has been honored by Barnard College, Columbia University as a Feminist Who Changed America Second Wave 1963–1975. She has traveled to East and West Africa, lived in the Caribbean and documented her journeys in photographs and the written word, completing an epic poem "Journey to the Heart Waters" which was also the title of an exhibition of photos and poems that opened at Round Hill Resort in Montego Bay in 2007.
Irma P. McClaurin is an American poet, anthropologist, academic, and leadership consultant. She was the first female president of Shaw University, and is the author or editor of several books on topics including the culture of Belize, black feminism, African-American history, and her own poetry.
Peggy Antrobus is a feminist activist, author, and scholar from the Caribbean. She served as Advisor on Women's Affairs to the government of Jamaica, and as United Nations advisor to the Barbados Ministry of Social Transformation. She is a founder member of several feminist organisations, including the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA), the global South feminist network Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and the International Gender and Trade Network (IGTN). She is the author of The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies.
Rhoda Reddock is a Trinidadian educator and social activist. She has served as founder, chair, adviser, or member of several organizations, such as the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA), the Global Fund for Women, and the Regional Advisory Committee of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS established by UNAIDS. In 2002 she received the Seventh CARICOM Triennial Award for Women, was Trinidad and Tobago's nominee for the International Women of Courage Award in 2008, and was honoured in her country's National Honour Awards ceremony in 2012 with the Gold Medal for the Development of Women.
The Sistren Theatre Collective, established in 1977, is a Jamaican community theatre group, whose work has been widely influential throughout the Caribbean. Their dramaturgy tends to focus on the oppression of women, on poverty, and race and imperialism.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Caribbean-American professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University, the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones (2008) and the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), as well as editor of several critical anthologies in African and Caribbean literature. She is currently the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, an endowed chair named after the 9th president of Cornell University. Among several other awards, she was the recipient of two major awards, both in 2017: the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York State African Studies Association.
Nelcia Robinson-Hazell is a Black Carib poet, community organizer and activist. She has spearheaded the development of policy initiatives throughout the Caribbean on issues regarding gender and indigenous identity. Serving as the president of the National Council of Women of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, she began in the 1980s to change the organization toward political action. Recognizing a need to establish research on the needs of women, she was involved in the creation of both local and regional organizations to analyze and develop information about the socio-economic and political inequalities women faced. She created similar initiatives for indigenous peoples, beginning first in Saint Vincent and then expanding them regionally. Robinson has been involved in international directives including the World Summit for Social Development and the 1995 World Conference on Women, as well as follow-up conferences discussing such issues as poverty, economic empowerment and violence against women. She has served as a civil society representative on the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commissions and as chair of the Commonwealth Women's Network.
Sister Vision Press was a Canadian small press publisher that operated from 1985 to 2001, and was the first press in Canada whose mission was to publish writing by and for women of colour.
Amina Doherty is a Nigerian/Antiguan feminist, artist and women's rights advocate. As an African-Caribbean feminist and women's rights advocate, her work is centered around raising awareness for social justice through movement-building, and innovative approaches to philanthropy and grantmaking. Amina's work takes many forms: art exhibitions, community programs, cultural events, philanthropic advising, and grantmaking initiatives.
Sonia Magdalena Cuales was a Curaçaoan feminist activist and writer. Her work in the United Nations system and with various advocacy groups focused on the intersection of women's rights and development across the Caribbean.
The Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) is a nongovernmental organization that advocates for women's rights and empowerment in the Caribbean. The regional network, which serves as an umbrella organization for progressive feminist groups in over a dozen countries, is based in Castries, St. Lucia.
Lina Chartrand (1948-1994) was a Canadian writer and theatre creator. She was a co-founder of the feminist theatre company, Company of Sirens. Her most famous work was the bilingual and partly autobiographical play, La P'tite Miss Easter Seals.
Aida Jordão is a Portuguese-Canadian playwright, theatre director, and academic. She is a co-founder of the feminist theatre group, Company of Sirens, and she co-created This is For You, Anna, a germinal Canadian feminist theatre play.
Gerlin Bean is a Jamaican community worker who was active in the radical feminist and Black nationalist movements in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. Trained as a nurse, she became a dedicated community activist and social worker, involved in the founding of the Black Women's Action Committee of the Black Unity and Freedom Party, the women's section of the Black Liberation Front, the Brixton Black Women's Group, and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent. Bean's work and activism focused on eliminating discriminatory policies for people of color, women, and people with disabilities. She fought for equal educational opportunity, fair wages, adequate housing, and programs that supported families, such as counseling services, child care, and health care.
