Our Panelists and Participants

Dr. Sonia Akter is Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) School of Public Policy. Before joining the LKY School, she was appointed as Scientist at IRRI where she led the Gender Research Team and was the coordinator for gender research of the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) program of the CGIAR. From 2011-2013, she was Senior Researcher at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, Leipzig, Germany. She completed her PhD in Environmental Management and Development from the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Australia. She obtained her Master’s degree in Economics from York University, Toronto, Canada. Dr. Akter worked on numerous policy-oriented research projects in South and Southeast Asia, Australia and Canada. Her three key research interests are climate change mitigation and adaptation policy, agriculture and food security, gender equity and women empowerment. Dr. Akter has published extensively on the design of institutions to encourage resilience and economic approaches to address socio-economic vulnerability. She has considerable experience working with communities, with particular focus on the developing world, including her native homeland of Bangladesh. She is presently an Associate Editor for the journal Food Security.

Jasna Baksic Muftic. PhD  is a full-time professor at Sarajevo University, School of Law, co-director of Gender studies, master and doctoral program at Center for interdisciplinary studies of Sarajevo University. Her teaching and research is Focusing on Theory of Law , Human Rights and Gender and law. She has published many research in this fields such as Socio economic status of Women in BiH, Position of Human Rights in Peace Agreement, Sexual harassment in private sector in BiH, Political representation of women in BiH. She cooperates with Bicocca University Milano ( Summer school ), SEELS (South East Europe Legal School network)  and other University ( Springer publishing as member board) 

Michele Bornstein is an advisor to the Women and Gender in Global Affairs network. She is currently a Grants Manager for CARE Bangladesh, where she has helped raise funding for Rohingya refugees — mostly women and children — who have fled from Myanmar. Prior to that, she served as the Country Director for an NGO in Sierra Leone, implementing gender and mental health projects following the country's Ebola crisis, and held consulting positions at the UNDP and the Human Rights Funders Network. Michele holds a Master in International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College. In 2011-2012 she was a recipient of the highly selective Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.

Dr. Namrata Chindarkar is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS) and a faculty associate at the Institute of Water Policy, NUS. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland concentrating in international development policy. Her research addresses questions pertaining to sustainable development and social policy. Currently, her three key research themes are access to basic infrastructure (energy, water, and sanitation); individual and household welfare (poverty, inequality, food security, subjective well-being); and gender and development. Her methodological approach is applied econometrics and policy impact evaluation using primary, secondary, and administrative policy data. Her research on gender and development examines interactions and spillovers of sustainable development and social policies from a gendered lens. These include effects of improved water supply, rural electrification, sanitation, and food security on women and girls. Another key aspect of her gender research is conceptualizing and operationalizing multi-dimensional empowerment (MDE) and examining the sustainability of MDE.

Dr. Krassimira Daskalova, Professor at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria; specialist in Modern Southeast European social and cultural history, feminist theory and methodology and women’s and gender history, in particular. She was guest professor in various European universities and held a number of fellowships, most recently at Harvard and Stanford University. In 2005-2010 she served as President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History and since 2007 Daskalova has been editor of Aspasia. The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History (published by Berghahn Books in New York). Dr Daskalova published extensively on the modern history of women and gender in Bulgaria, the Balkans and Eastern Europe not only in her native Bulgarian, but also in English, German, Russian, Serbo-Croatian. Her most recent books include as author Women, Gender and Modernization in Bulgaria, 1878-1944 (Sofia University Press, 2012); as co-editor Gendering Popular Culture. Perspectives from Eastern Europe and the West (POLIS, 2013); Women’s Activism. Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (Routledge, 2012); Gendering Post-Socialist Transition. Studies of Changing Gender Perspectives (LIT Verlag, 2012), among others.

Dr. Kent Davis-Packard launched SAIS Women Lead and its Practicum Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where she is on the faculty of the Global Theory and History Program.  She also taught SAIS’s first Women, Peace, and Security course and is Features Editor of the Journal on Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism based at the London School of Economics.

Previously she was Co-Executive Director of Women's Learning Partnership, and a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the American University in Cairo. As a Presidential Management Fellow, Davis-Packard played a key role in launching the State Department’s Women in Public Service Project and managed the Egypt Desk's human rights portfolio. Davis-Packard also served as a U.S. Department of Defense country desk officer in Iraq; and as a U.S. Department of State political officer in Syria. 

Yasmine Ergas directs the Specialization on Gender and Public Policy at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is also Senior Advisor to the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, a member of the Committee on Global Thought and co-chair of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Council of Columbia University. Her work focuses on gender and women’s rights in international perspective; human rights and globalization; and the integration of gender perspectives in global affairs. Her new book is Reassembling Motherhood: Procreation and Care in a Globalized World, co-edited with Jane Jenson and Sonya Michel (Columbia University Press, 2017). She has been engaged as a scholar, advocate and policy consultant on women’s rights and gender issues and human rights more broadly through her work with international and domestic policy and advocacy organizations. She has received numerous honors, awards and fellowships including from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Italian National Council of Research, and the Compton Foundation. 

Dr. Goetz joined NYU’s Center for Global Affairs in January 2014, where she teaches International Relations and Comparative Politics.  She is both an academic and a policy-maker.  She was a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex between 1991 and 2005, and she worked for the United Nations in Africa (Chad and Guinea) in the mid-1980s and at the UN’s New York headquarters between 2005 and 2014, as UNIFEM and UN Women’s Chief Advisor on Peace and Security.  Dr. Goetz spearheaded initiatives to promote women’s empowerment in the UN’s peacebuilding work, supported changes in peace-making and peacekeeping practice to ensure women’s participation in peace talks and post conflict elections, and promoted policy changes to enable better protection of women from violence.   Dr. Goetz was instrumental in producing the content and supporting negotiations for Security Council resolutions on women’s participation in peacebuilding, conflict-related sexual violence and women’s leadership in conflict resolution.  

Professor Goetz is the author of eight books on the subjects of gender and politics in developing countries, gender and institutional change, and public sector accountability reforms, including a 2009 volume: Governing Women: Women in Politics and Governance in Developing Countries (Routlegde).   

Karolina Hrga is executive director of the Center for Women's Studies, the first non-institutional educational center for feminist knowledge production in Croatia, founded in 1995 by a group of feminists, theorists and scholars, peace activists and artists. The program offers insight into the various themes of feminism and gender studies, women's culture and history, women's rights and gender equality.

She is also translator and editor-in-chief of the non-profit audiovisual web portal Slobodni Filozofski - SkriptaTV which emerged as part of the student struggle for publicly funded higher education 2008-2010. Her current focus is the connection between class exploitation and other oppressive regimes (gender, racial, sexual and other) from the feminist materialist perspective.

Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair in the Department of International Affairs at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Program on Women, Peace, and Security.  She is the author or editor of several books, including (with Andrea Den Boer) Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press, 2004), which won the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social Demography, resulting in feature stories in the New York Times, The Economist, 60 Minutes, and other news publications.  Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009, and in 2015 was recognized as Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA/ISA) and awarded an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship as well as an inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Australian National University (2017). Hudson is one of the Principal Investigators of The WomanStats Project (http://womanstats.org), which includes the largest compilation of data on the status of women in the world today, and her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation as well as the Minerva Initiative of the US Department of Defense.  Her book Sex and World Peace, co-authored with Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad Emmett, and published by Columbia University Press, was listed by Gloria Steinem in 2014 as one of the top three books on her “Reading Our Way to the Revolution” list.  Hudson’s most recent book with Patricia Leidl, also from Columbia University Press, is entitled The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy (2015).  Her latest book project is The First Political Order: Sex, Governance, and National Security.

Evgenia Ivanova (LLB, MA in Sociology of Law, MA in Gender Studies) is researcher, teacher and activist from Belarus. Evgenia teaches at European Humanities University (Vilnius), she is a research associate and a Board member of the Centre for Gender Studies (EHU). Evgenia is an editor-in-chief (together with Alex Pershai) of a Russian-speaking almanac “Women in Politics: new approaches to the political”.

Evgenia is a co-founder and co-chair a CSO “Adliga: Women for Full Citizenship” (Belarus).  She is an elected Board member of WIDE+ network (Women in Development Europe), as well as a Board member of the International Centre for Civil Initiatives “Our House”.

Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat is Professor of Political Science at UConn. Her research focuses on theoretical and empirical questions related to human rights, with an emphasis on women’s rights. She is the Founding President of the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association. In addition to serving on the editorial board of several journals, she serves as the series editor of a new book series with the Lynne Rienner Publishers – “Politics and Human Rights.” Her publications include numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as books such as Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries (1991) and Deconstructing Images of ‘‘The Turkish Woman,’’ (1998), Non-state Actors in the Human Rights Universe (2006); Human Rights Worldwide (2006); Human Rights in Turkey (2007, received Choice Award of Outstanding Academic Title); and The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights.

Chara Karagiannopoulou is an Assistant Professor at Panteion University- Athens. She teaches Comparative Politics, Gender and International Relations, as well as, Religion and International Politics. She holds a M.Th. degree in History and Philosophy of Religions from King’s College, London and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Since 2004 she is a member of the Scientific Committee in the Research Center for Gender Equality (KETHI). Among her recent publications are “Contemporary Armed Conflicts and the Issue of ‘Religious’ Violence”, Culture and Research, 2015. “Religion and Gender Equality: imprints of a conflictual relationship in the international arena”, In Changing Greece and the World: Ideas and Politics, University of Peloponnese, 2016 and “Religious Cleavage: An instrument of the Great Powers’ Foreign Policy towards Albania”, Albanian Journal of Politics, (2): 2009. Her research interests include: identity politics in IR; Gender and IR; Religion and IR.

Katerina is the director of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities-Skopje, Macedonia and a professor of gender studies at the University American College-Skopje. She is also a visiting professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade: Postgraduate Program in Political Studies. In the past decade she has been one of the coordinators of several European research projects and academic networks: Gender, Migration and Culture in Europe FP7 project (coordinated the study of intercultural violence: 2008-2011), co-chair of the Network for Gender and Women's Studies in Southeast Europe (2004-2012) and a Course Director of the ReSET program in gender studies (2004-2006). In 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar in the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the author of Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Post-stucturalist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (Brooklyn: Punctum books, 2015). Kolozova is the editor of After the “Speculative Turn”: Realism, Philosophy, and Feminism (Brooklyn: Punctum books, 2016), co-edited with Eileen A. Joy, and has contributed to several collections such as Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press) edited by Anthony Paul Smith and John Mullarkey, Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) edited by Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve and most recently the Post-Human Glossary (Bloomsbery Academic Press, 2017) edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova.