Week 1: Poverty
Elaine Unterhalter
Elaine Unterhalter is a Professor of Education and International Development at the Institute of Education. She has more than 25 years experience working on themes concerned with gender, race and class inequalities and their bearing on education. Her specialist interests are in the capability approach and human development and education in Africa, particularly South Africa. Her current concerns are with education, poverty and global social justice. Elaine’s book Gender, Schooling and Global Social Justice won first prize in the Society of Education Studies book awards in 2008. She is currently working with a number of UN agencies on aspects of gender and the MDGs.
Amy North
Amy North is a researcher at the Institute of Education, London, working on gender, education and global poverty reduction initiatives. She has extensive experience of working with NGOs, women’s organisations and education networks in Africa and Latin America.
Week 2: Quality Education for gender equality
Sheila Aikman
Sheila Aikman has been working with the Institute of Education and Oxfam GB on the Beyond Access project, investigating knowledge and practice for gender equality and education. Since joining the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia two years ago, she has also been researching and teaching in the area of indigenous and intercultural education.
Anita Rampal
Anita Rampal is Head and Dean, Faculty of Education, Delhi University. She has been involved with the new National Curriculum Framework and was Chairperson of the NCERT Textbook Development Teams for the Primary Stage. Her special interests include participatory curriculum development through academic-activist engagement, cognition and communication of science and mathematics, and policy analysis for equity in education. She has been a Nehru Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, was actively associated with the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme in rural schools, the National Literacy Campaigns through the ‘Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti’, and the People’s Science Movement. She served on the Executive Committee of NCERT, as the (Hon.) Director of the National Literacy Resource Centre, on the EC of the National Literacy Mission, and committees of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. She has co-authored books such as the ‘Public Report on Basic Education’ (PROBE, OUP), ‘Numeracy Counts!’, Zindagi Ka Hisaab, has written research articles, reports and school textbooks, and also produced films on women’s education and political participation, such as ‘Mukhia Hum Banbe’.
Week 3: Breaking the Silence: contesting violence and girls’ education
Victorine Djitrinou
Human right activist, trainer, campaigner and development worker, Victorine Kemonou Djitrinou joined the ActionAid international education team in 2005. She is the leading ActionAid international education campaign, which works through providing leadership on innovative education campaigning and advocacy work across the organization, particularly reinforcing approaches to people- centred campaigning and advocacy and encouraging strong links between grassroots mobilization and high-level work. She coordinates ActionAid campaigns on education financing with the use of the newly-produced education financing toolkit, and also conducts work on violence against girls at school. She has a rich background in teaching and training, advocacy and campaigns, participation as a board member, advocacy for human rights and fundamental rights at work, and has networked and campaigned for human and women’s rights with Amnesty International at national, regional and international level.
Akanksha Marphatia
Akanksha A. Marphatia is currently the Senior Education Research & Policy Coordinator at ActionAid. She is based in London, but has experience working on gender, education, violence, and finance issues. Prior to joining ActionAid, Akanksha worked with a number of UN Agencies, Governments, NGOs and Research Institutes in Sub Saharan Africa and India. Akanksha has a Masters in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Week 4: Connecting Social Policy: climate change, health, AIDS and girls’ education
Relebohile Moletsane
Relebohile Moletsane is Research Director in Gender and Development in the Policy Analysis and Capacity Enhancement (PACE) programme at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), South Africa. She holds an honorary Associate Professorship in the Faculty of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has extensive experience in teaching and research in the areas of curriculum studies and gender and education, including gender-based violence and its links to HIV and AIDS and AIDS-related stigma, body politics, as well as on girlhood studies in Southern African contexts. Her research interests include the use of participatory visual research methodologies in research and development work with marginalized groups. She is the co-author (with Claudia Mitchell, Ann Smith and Linda Chisholm) of the book: Methodologies for Mapping a Southern African Girlhood in Age of Aids. Rotterdam/New York/Taipei: Sense Publishers and a co-editor (with Kathleen Pithouse and Claudia Mitchell) of the 2009 book: Making Connections: Self-Study & Social Action. New York: Peter Lang.
Patricia Ames
Patricia Ames is a researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP). She is anthropologist and holds a PhD in Anthropology of Education from the University of London. Currently she acts as the lead qualitative researcher in Peru for the international project on childhood poverty Young Lives. She has extensive experience in teaching and research in the areas of rural education, multigrade teaching, literacy and gender inequalities, and the interplay between ethnicity, gender and power relations in education and childhood. She had taught in several Peruvian universities such as the Catholic University (PUCP), the San Marcos University (UNMSM) and the Cayetano Heredia University (UPCH). In 2006, she was visiting professor at the Summer Institute in Language, Culture and Teaching in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University, Canada. Her research interests include the use of qualitative, ethnographic and participatory research methodologies. She is editor of Las brechas invisibles (Invisible gaps) a book on research about gender inequalities in Peruvian education (IEP, Lima, 2006) and contributed to the volume edited by Unterhalter, E. and S. Aikman (eds) Beyond access: Transforming policy and practice for Gender Equality in Education (OXFAM, Oxford, 2005).
Week 5: Convergence week
Elaine Unterhalter
Rosie Peppin Vaughan
Rosie Peppin Vaughan completed a PhD last year on global campaigns on girls’ education, at the University of Cambridge. Recently she has been research fellow on Development Discourses, an ESRC project on higher education and poverty reduction in South Africa, and has also been regional consultant to UNIFEM on a project on Ending Violence against Women and Girls through Education.
