Starhawk is an American writer, teacher and activist. She is known as a theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism. She is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and for On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post online forum on religion. Her book The Spiral Dance (1979) was one of the main inspirations behind the Goddess movement. In 2013, she was listed in Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Indigenous feminist and human rights activist from Guatemala. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
Myrna Kostash is a Canadian writer and journalist. She has published several non-fiction books and written for many Canadian magazines including Chatelaine.
Devaki Jain is an Indian economist and writer, who has worked mainly in the field of feminist economics. In 2006 she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award from Government of India, for her contribution to social justice and the empowerment of women.
Janice G. Raymond is an American lesbian radical feminist and professor emerita of women's studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is known for her work against violence, sexual exploitation and the medical abuse of women, and for her controversial work on transsexuality.
Iris Marion Young was an American political theorist and socialist feminist focused on the nature of justice and social difference. She served as Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and was affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and the Human Rights program there. Her research covered contemporary political theory, feminist social theory, and normative analysis of public policy. She believed in the importance of political activism and encouraged her students to involve themselves in their communities.
Cynthia Holden Enloe is a feminist writer, theorist, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. In 2015, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, in conjunction with the academic publisher Taylor & Francis, created the Cynthia Enloe Award "in honour of Cynthia Enloe's pioneering feminist research into international politics and political economy, and her considerable contribution to building a more inclusive feminist scholarly community."
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne. An English expatriate and lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Shahrzad Mojab is an academic activist and professor, teaching at the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education and Women and Gender Studies Institute, at the University of Toronto. Shahrzad has been living in Canada since 1986 with her lifelong partner, colleague and comrade, Amir Hassanpour, and their son, Salah.
Elaine Bernard is the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is also a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society which she describes as offering "an opportunity to reach across borders, time zones, organizations, communities, and individual interests and grow solidarity".
Sakena Yacoobi is the founder and Executive Director of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), an Afghan women-led NGO she founded in 1995. She is well known for her work for the rights of children, women and education. She has earned international recognition for her work and received numerous awards. This includes the 2013 Opus Prize, 2015 WISE Prize in Education and 2016 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education as well as 6 honorary degrees including from Princeton University.
Amrita Basu is an American academic and political scientist. She currently is a professor at Amherst College where she holds affiliations in the departments of Political Science, Sexuality, Women's, & Gender Studies, Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Black Studies.
Mahnaz Afkhami is an Iranian women's rights activist who served in the Cabinet of Iran from 1976 to 1978.
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.
Alison Mary Jaggar is an American feminist philosopher born in England. She is College Professor of Distinction in the Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies departments at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She was one of the first people to introduce feminist concerns in to philosophy.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism that sees environmentalism, and the relationship between women and the earth, as foundational to its analysis and practice. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts that a feminist perspective of ecology does not place women in the dominant position of power, but rather calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Sunera Thobani is a feminist sociologist, academic, and activist. Her research interests include critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, anti-imperialism, Islamophobia, Indigeneity, and the War on Terror. She is currently an associate professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Thobani is also a founding member of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality/Equity (R.A.C.E.), the former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), and the director for the Centre for Race, Autobiography, Gender, and Age (RAGA).
Anasuya Sengupta is an Indian poet, author, activist, and a cited expert in representation for marginalized voices on the Internet.
Rekha Pande is currently the Director of the Centre for Women's Studies and a Professor of History in the University of Hyderabad, India. She is a well-known and well published scholar in the inter-disciplinary areas of History and Women's Studies. She is an established academician in the field of international studies, women's history and Gender studies. As a feminist historian she has been concerned with the theoretical and methodological problems of reconstructing women's history and in understanding the historical roots of women's subordination in the South Asian context. She also attempts to examine the varied historical contexts at the regional/local levels and explain the reproduction and subordination of women at the national and global scale—in a variety of related, albeit different, contemporary contexts. She has been an academic activist involved with the Women's Movement in India.
Margo Okazawa-Rey, is a Japanese-American professor emerita, educator, writer, and social justice activist, who is most known as a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, and for her transnational feminist advocacy.
