Academia and Women’s Studies

Hajiya Binta Abdulhamid was born on March 20, 1965, in Kano, the capital of Kano State, in northern Nigeria. She attended primary school and girls’ secondary school in Kano and Kaduna State. Thereafter she attended classes at Bayero University in Kano, where she received a degree in Islamic Studies. While she initially wanted to be a journalist, in 1983 she was encouraged to take education courses at the tertiary level in order to serve as a principal in girls’ secondary schools in Kano State. While other women had served in this position, there had been no women from Kano State who had done so. She has subsequently worked under the Kano State Ministry of Education, serving as school principal in several girls’ secondary schools in Kano State. Her experiences as a principal and teacher in these schools have enabled her to support girl child education in the state and she has encouraged women students to complete their secondary school education and to continue on to postgraduate education. She sees herself as a woman-activist in her advocacy of women’s education and has been gratified to see many of her former students working as medical doctors, lawyers, and politicians.

Keywords: academia and women's studies, education, reform of domestic/family roles

Media: Name Pronunciation Audio, Transcript, Video, YouTube Video

Dr. Joyce Agofure was born on April 3, 1978, in Benin City, the capital of Edo State, in southern Nigeria. She first attended primary school in Benin City and continued her education, obtaining her first degree in English and Education. She then entered the Masters’ Degree Program at Ahmadu Bello University-Zaria where she received a Masters’ Degree and subsequently a PhD in English literature. She was particularly interested in eco-feminism and the consequences of climate change on the lives of women. As a senior lecturer and the Coordinator of Postgraduate Studies in the Department of English at Ahmadu Bello University, she teaches courses which include Introduction to Literature, African Literature and Literature Theory. She assigns readings in Nigerian women’s literature, some of which consider the challenges faced by women which she discusses in these courses. She was able to expand her knowledge of eco-feminism, particularly the ways that women are seen as natural beings and the environment is characterized as feminine, during her tenure as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Idaho. This experience has enabled her to become involved in developing a course on Eco-Feminism to be taught in the Department of English at ABU.

Keywords: environment, academia and women's studies, art/writing as activism

Media: Name Pronunciation Audio, Transcript, Video, YouTube Video

Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi was born in 1971 in Ilorin, Kwara State Nigeria. Akiyode-Afolabi studied law at the Obafemi Awolowo University. She received her LLM from the Notre Dame School of Law in the US and a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London where she specialized in women’s peace and security studies. In 2002, she established the Women Advocates Research and Documentation Center (WARDC), a not-for-profit focused on maternal and reproductive health advocacy, gender-based violence, and social justice. She also teaches International Humanitarian Law at the University of Lagos. Akiyoda-Afolabi organized grassroot networks connecting women in Nigeria. Such networks have been established in colleges across Nigeria. Read #Womanifesto: What Nigerian Women Want, an important document in Nigerian women’s movement efforts that Akiyode-Afolabi collaborated on, here.

Keywords: academia and women's studies, community activism, environment

Media: Name Pronunciation Audio, Transcript, Video, YouTube Video

Ngāhuia te Awekotuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Waikato, Ngapuhi iwi) was a leader of the women’s liberation movement in New Zealand in the 1970s. As a student, she was a member of the Ngā Tamatoa Māori activist group at the University of Auckland. As a Māori lesbian, Ngāhuia was at the forefront of a call to focus on reaching Māori and Pacific women, as well as lesbian rights. 

In 1972, she was famously denied a visa to visit the United States on the basis of her sexuality. She was the first Māori woman to gain a doctorate from an Aotearoa/NZ university.  

At the outset, women’s liberation groups adopted an all-inclusive ‘sisterhood is powerful’ approach. But it wasn’t long before differing perspectives on a range of issues led to disagreements. Many Māori women saw women’s liberation as a Pākehā concept with little relevance for them. They argued that Māori women’s rights were intertwined with the revival of Māori culture and the assertion of land rights. By 1973, separate Māori and lesbian groups had started to form and as the decade progressed ideological differences divided the movement further.  

Te Awekotuku has worked across the heritage, culture and academic sectors as a curator, lecturer, governor, researcher, and activist. Her areas of research interest include gender issues, culture and heritage, ritual and performance. She has been curator of ethnology at the Waikato Museum; senior lecturer in art history at Auckland University, and professor of Māori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She was Professor of Research and Development at Waikato University, and has researched and written extensively about the traditional and contemporary practices of tā moko (tattoo) in New Zealand, as well as Māori practices and traditions around death. She has served on many government boards in the arts and heritage sector. Ngāhuia is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Waikato, the first Māori female Emeritus in Aotearoa. She remains a leading feminist writer, lesbian rights activist, and advocate for Māori issues. She has published short fiction, poetry, and significant nonfiction. She continues to work and curate in the gallery sector. She is also an active practitioner of traditional chant and ceremony. In 2022, she presented the 3 episode video documentary Waharoa: Art of the Pacific that focuses on Māori and Pasifika art in New Zealand.   

In recognition of her services to Māori culture, Ngāhuia was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2010. In 2016 she was made the inaugural Mareikura or Matriarch of the Pae Akoranga Wahine/Women's Studies Association of Aotearoa/New Zealand. In 2017 she was made a Fellow of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and she also received the Pou Aronui Supreme Award from the Royal Society of New Zealand for outstanding service to the arts and humanities. Currently, she is one of three inaugural Ruānuku, or Esteemed Scholarly Elders, of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, the National Centre for Māori Research Excellence. 

Keywords: academia and women's studies, indigenous issues, LGBTQ+ rights

Media: Transcript, YouTube Video

Urvashi Butalia, born in 1952, is a co-founder of Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house. She has worked as an editor at the Oxford University Press and Zed Press Books and taught publishing at Delhi University. She has won several awards, among them the Nikai Asia Prize for Culture (2003) and the Pandora Women in Publishing Award (2000).
Keywords: environment, media, academia and women's studies, art/writing as activism, intersectionality
Media: Transcript (English), Video, Bibliography, YouTube Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Kerri Du Pont is Senior Project Manager for the Ministry of Social Development. Coming from a background in brand and digital strategy and design, she emigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1996 to work as a Senior Lecturer at Massey’s School of Design. Kerri has worked in strategic communications and project management in the public service since 2018. She has worked in central government and service delivery agencies advising on strategic communications, policy, reporting and risk assessment for managers, senior leaders and ministers, and has contributed to the delivery of key initiatives for diversity and inclusion and social cohesion across the system. She helped design the strategic priorities for the public sector-wide Government Women’s Network and significantly grew its membership and visibility. She has also been a trans-Tasman representative on a disability working group and contributes to the New Zealand Government Web community for accessibility. 

Kerri is also a Board member for the National Council of Women of New Zealand where she leads the communications strategy for the organisation.

She was instrumental in the recent launch of both the results of the 2023 gender attitudes survey and the platform of women's resources, listed below:

https://www.pockety.org.nz/ (A hub for services for women, developed and launched by Kerri Du Pont.)

https://genderequal.nz/ga-survey/ (Website of Gender Equal NZ, led by the National Council of Women of New Zealand. The results of the 2023 gender attitudes survey are available on this site in both summary format and pdf.)

Keywords: academia and women's studies, international rights, politics and the law

Media: Transcript, YouTube Video

He Zhonghua, born in 1937, is a professor of literature from the Naxi ethnic minority. She established a women's studies center in the Academy of Social Sciences and a minority women research center in Yunnan. She has worked on many projects ranging from improving ethnic minority women's health to empowering women to participate in rural development.
Keywords: feminist conferences, environment, academia and women's studies, education, intersectionality, rural women and land reform
Media: Transcript (English, Mandarin), Video (English, Mandarin), Bibliography, YouTube Video (Mandarin, English Dubbed), Name Pronunciation Audio

Prue Hyman, born in England in 1943, is a feminist economist. She moved to New Zealand in 1969 to work at Victoria University, Wellington, eventually becoming an Associate Professor of Economics and Gender and Women's Studies until controversial restructuring between 2008 and 2010 abolished Gender and Women's Studies. She has also advised the New Zealand government through her work at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (1989-1990). Hyman studies the personal aspects of economics, such as how work is valued, with a particular focus on living wages and pay equity. 

She has written two books: Women and Economics: A New Zealand Feminist Perspective (1994), and Hopes Dashed?: The Economics of Gender Inequality (2017). In 2000, she was commissioned by the New Zealand Police Force to write an influential report titled Women in CIB: Opportunities for and Barriers to the Recruitment, Progress and Retention of Women in the Criminal Investigation Branch. While retired from university work, she continues to champion gender pay equity issues. 

Keywords: academia and women's studies, intersectionality, politics and the law

Media: Transcript, YouTube Video

Natal'ia Iur'evna Kamenetskaia was born in Moscow in 1959 and is an art historian, an exhibition curator, the author of critical articles on issues of women in art, and a curator of international and regional art projects. She was one of the first organizers of feminist exhibitions and conferences on gender issues in Russia in the early 1990s. She is also co-founder and director of an independent non-profit cultural organization, Creative Laboratory AAE (Art, Academics, Education).
Keywords: art/writing as activism, academia and women's studies
Media: Transcript (English, Russian), YouTube Video (English, Russian),  Name Pronunciation Audio

Yelena Viktorovna Kochkina, born in 1956, began working in gender research in 1990. Her work focuses on a gender analysis of legal reform in Russia, structural adjustment programs and the implementation of equal opportunity policies in Russia, as well as gender in the Russian education system. She is a research fellow and professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Studies of the Population at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Keywords: academia and women's studies, politics and the law, intersectionality, community activism, reform of domestic/family roles, feminist conferences
Media: Transcript (English, Russian), YouTube Video (English, Russian), Name Pronunciation Audio

Lata Pratibha Madhukar, born in 1955, has worked as an anchorperson for the radio in Maharashtra, a research assistant in the Research Centre for Women's Studies, and later an activist at the Women's Centre. She joined Narmada Bachao Andolan for environmental rights and became the national convenor for the National Alliance of People's Movements.
Keywords: academia and women's studies, gender-based violence
Media: Transcript (English), Video, Bibliography, YouTube Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Liu Bohong, born in 1951, is Deputy Director of the Institute of Research on Women of the All-China Women's Federation, circulating feminism and promoting gender-awareness in the Chinese government system, notably formulating national programs that implement the 1995 UN Platform for Action.
Keywords: academia and women's studies, education, gender-based violence, politics and the law, reproductive rights, rural women and land reform
Media: Transcript (English, Mandarin), Video (English, Mandarin), Bibliography, YouTube Video (Mandarin, English Dubbed), Name Pronunciation Audio

Dr. Mairo Usman Mandara was born on June 5, 1965, in Bukuru, just outside of Jos, the capital of Plateau State, Nigeria. She first attended primary school in Bukuru and continued her post-secondary education at the University of Jos. There she studied medicine, specifically women’s health issues, an interest that expanded to include the socio-economic issues associated with women’s health such as VVF (vesico-vaginal fistula), e.g., early marriage and stunting due to malnutrition. Her work as an obstetric-gynaecologist led to a broader feminist concern with girl-child education, the founding of the Federation of Muslim Women of Nigeria (FOMWAN), and with the NGO, Girl-Child Concerns. Between 2005 and 2010, Dr. Mandara was a Senior Country Adviser in Nigeria to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and more recently worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the Country Representative to Nigeria. Her current activist and scholarly work reflect her belief in the importance of working with traditional political and religious leaders in encouraging parents to enable their daughters to complete their secondary school education.

Keywords: gender and health, reform of domestic/family roles, academia and women's studies, feminist conferences

Media: Name Pronunciation Audio, Transcript, Video, YouTube Video

Vina Mazumdar (1927-2013) was a professor and past fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, serving on the Committee on the Status of Women in India and later directing the Programme of Women's Studies at the Indian Council of Social Science Research. She founded the Centre for Women's Development Studies and became its Chairperson. The GFP staff note with sadness the death of Vina in 2013. To learn more about her contribution to women's movement in India, read her public obituary written in The Hindu Paper.
Keywords: feminist conferences, academia and women's studies, rural women and land reform, politics and the law
Media: Transcript (English), YouTube Video, Video, Bibliography, Name Pronunciation Audio

Mariia Viktorovna Mikhailova was born in 1946. At last contact, she was serving as a Distinguished Professor at Moscow State University in the Department of History of Russian Literature of the Contemporary Period and Modern Literary Process. Her focus is the literary creativity of women, women’s literary criticism, and women playwrights of the Silver Age of Russian Literature (from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of 20th century). She was a member of the editorial board of the first feminist literary journal in Russia, Transformation.
Keywords: academia and women's studies, art/writing as activism, education
Media: Transcript (English, Russian), Video (Russian, English Subtitles), Name Pronunciation Audio

Haynará Negreiros was born in São Paulo and holds a master's degree in Science of Religion from PUC SP (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo), where she investigated the relationships between clothing, candomblé and affective memories of the community of the Redandá terreiro (Redandá candomblé house) from São Paulo. Haynará is a writer and researcher of diverse aesthetic languages and her main areas of study are Afro-Brazilian and African aesthetics that are manifested through dress, fashion, religiosity and family memories. She published in Blogueiras Negras, has a tumblr called O axé nas roupas (The axé in the clothes), where in her own words she “performs a mapping of memories, a cartography about Afro-Brazilian aesthetics”. In 2018 she worked as a curatorial assistant at Red Bull Station, a space for experimenting with arts and music in downtown São Paulo. Between November 2019 and March 2020, she was the curator of the exhibition Indumentárias negras em foco (Black clothing in focus), that was the result of a partnership between the Moreira Salles Institute and the Feira Preta Institute. She currently teaches seminars at the MASP-São Paulo Art Museum School and at the Adelina Institute and writes the column "Negras Maneiras" (Black Manners) at ELLE Brazil.

Keywords: racial identity, art/writing as activism, academia and women's studies

Media: Transcript (Portuguese, English), Video, YouTube Video (Portuguese, English Subtitles)

Bianca Maria Pomeranzi was born in 1950 in Arezzo. She has been a part of the Roman Feminist Movement of Via Pompeo Magno since the mid-1970s. With the group Vivere Lesbica she organized the first Italian Lesbian Feminist Conference in 1981. As an expert on gender and development issues, she worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Development Cooperation. She served as an Expert on the Commission of the United Nations Convention for the Rights of Women, CEDAW. She is vice president of the Association for the Renewal of the Left and politically active in the Wednesday Feminist Group  and the Alma Sabatini Feminist Studies Center. 

Keywords: academia and women's studies, LGBTQ+ rights, politics and the law

Media: Transcript (Italian, English), YouTube Video (Italian, English Subtitles)

Maria de Fátima Lima Santos, born in 1974, grew up in Aracaju in the northeast of Brazil. She is an anthropologist and an associate professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro where she teaches courses related to gender, health and community. Her scholarly and activist focus is on health care and understandings of health for the LGBT community.
Keywords: gender and health, LGBTQ rights, academia and women's studies
Media: Transcript (English, Portuguese), Video, YouTube Video (Portuguese, English Subtitles), Name Pronunciation Audio

Liubov Vasil'evna Shtyleva, born in 1956, was a teacher of history in public schools before going back to get her doctorate in education. She then taught educational science and psychology at the Murmansk State Pedagogical Institute, worked at the Institute for Social Pedagogy at the Russian Academy of Education, and was the principal research associate at the Institute of Childhood, Family and Upbringing at the Russian Academy of Education. She has worked on issues of education and gender in Russia and internationally.
Keywords: academia and women's studies, reform of domestic/family roles, community activism, feminist conferences
Media: Transcript (English, Russian), YouTube Video (English, Russian), Video (Russian), Name Pronunciation Audio

Anna Titkow was born in 1942. She has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Warsaw and has worked as an instructor and researcher in medical sociology since 1979. At last contact, she was serving as a Professor of Gender Studies at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology in Warsaw. Titkow is a notable feminist scholar and one of her earliest efforts was a contribution to the "Sisterhood is Global" anthology published in 1984. Titkow's work challenges Polish gender and sexuality taboos.
Keywords: academia and women's studies, reform of domestic/family roles
Media: Transcript (English, Polish), Video (English, Polish), Bibliography, English YouTube Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Ruth Vanita, born in 1955, is an author and professor at the University of Montana, where she teaches courses in the Humanities, Literature, and Women's Studies. She was formerly a reader in English at Miranda House and the English department, Delhi University. She is one of the founding co-editors of Manushi, India's first feminist journal.
Keywords: education, gender-based violence, LGBTQ rights, community activism, academia and women's studies
Media: Transcript (English), Video, Bibliography, YouTube Video, Name Pronunciation Audio

Elizabeth Viana (interviewed with Giovana Xavier) was born in 1954 in Rio de Janeiro and is a sociologist. She helped found the Group Lima Barret and actively participated in the democratization process of the country. She has been involved with the Nzinga Collective of Women, the Unified Black Movement (MNU), and the Black Action of Nilópolis. She has been the Legislative Assistant at the Municipal Chamber of Rio de Janeiro for 35 years.
Keywords: community activism, racial identity, academia and women's studies, reform of domestic/family roles
Media: Transcript (English, Portuguese), Video, YouTube Video (Portuguese, English Subtitles), Name Pronunciation Audio

Giovana Xavier (interviewed with Elizabeth Viana) was born in 1979 in Irajá. She is a professor of History at The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. As a black intersectional feminist, Giovana situates her activism in the academy, especially through her work with black students at the university. At the last contact, she was involved in the project “Black Professors in the First Person: History Teaching and Activist Research.”
Keywords: community activism, racial identity, academia and women's studies
Media: Transcript (English, Portuguese), Video, YouTube Video (Portuguese, English Subtitles), Name Pronunciation Audio