Keynote Speakers

Professor Emerita Ida Blom, University of Bergen.

As a pioneer within the field of gendered history, Professor Blom has contributed with ground-breaking research within several fields of gender history, such as sexuality and reproductive matters, gendered work, gender and nationalism, gendered global history, health history and the history of women’s political rights. Her fields of research over the past 40 years include international and comparative gender history, as well as welfare research and medical history. Her latest book ”Legislation on Venereal Disease in Five Northern European Countries, c.1870-c.1995 ” was published in 2012 .

http://snl.no/Ida_Blom

Associate Professor of Sociology Mounira Maya Charrad, University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Associate Professor Charrad’s research focuses on politics, state formation, women’s rights, Islamic law and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the award-winning author of States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (2001). Her current studies of conceptions of modernity in legal discourses in the Middle East are grounded in analysis of social solidarities, such as in kinship and ethnicity.

http://www.utexas.edu/opa/experts/profile.php?id=70

Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Jasbir Puar,Rutgers University, USA.

Professor Puar’s research focuses on gender, sexuality, globalization; postcolonial and diaspora studies; South Asian cultural studies; queer disability studies and theories of assemblage and affect. She is the author of the award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007). Professor Puar currently holds the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

http://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/faculty/core-faculty/143-jasbir-puar

Professor in Gender Research in the Social Sciences  Birthe Siim, the Department of Culture and Global Studies Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark.

Professor Siim is Research Director of the Knowledge Centre: Equality, Diversity and Gender (EDGE) and of FREIA, the Gender Research Centre, AAU. Her main areas of expertise are gender theory; comparative studies of citizenship, democracy, migration/multiculturalism and the welfare state. Her latest book is  Negotiating Gender and Diversity in an emergent European Public Sphere (eds. with M. Mokre) (Palgrave 2012, fortc.) and she has contributed to the recent book Female Suffrage in Europe (Brill 2012).

 http://personprofil.aau.dk/104482?lang=en

University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, USA.

Professor Spivak is a literary critic, working within feminism, Marxism, deconstruction and globalization. As a leading postcolonial theorist over many years, she has published numerous books and articles, among them the seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). Her latest book is An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012). Professor Spivak is also an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements.

http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/409

Professor of Communication and Media Studies Liesbet van Zoonen, Loughborough University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Professor van Zoonen’s research concerns gender, media and politics, emphasizing the question of how popular culture might serve as a resource for citizenship, participation and civic engagement. Her most recent research projects have focused on multiculturalism, identity management and new media technologies. She has written several books including Feminist Media Studies and Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge.

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/socialsciences/staff/liesbet-van-zoonen.html