Advisors

Srilatha Batliwala

Srilatha Batliwala is Scholar Associate with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and a freelance consultant and researcher. Her current work focuses on concepts and practices of feminist movement building, leadership, and monitoring and evaluation, and on capacity building and mentoring for young feminist leaders. Srilatha began her working life in 1975 and has over the decades bridged grassroots activism, advocacy, teaching, research, training, grant-making and scholarly work, all with a strong commitment to gender equality and social justice. Since the mid-90s, she has worked primarily internationally, including as a Programme Officer in the Ford Foundation (New York), a Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organisations (Harvard University, till end 2009), and since 2007, with AWID. She is well known for her leadership of large-scale grassroots empowerment movements (such as SPARC and Mahila Samakhya) that mobilised and empowered thousands of the poorest women in both urban and rural areas in India. Srilatha has published extensively on a range of women’s issues, including the widely translated and used Women’s empowerment in South Asia – Concepts and practices, and more recently, the AWID documents, Changing their world – Concepts and practices of women’s movements and Capturing change in women’s realities.

 

Andrea Cornwall

Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex (UK). A political anthropologist, she works on sexualities, new democratic spaces and gender. Publications include Gender myths and feminist fables: the struggle for interpretive power in gender and development (co-edited with Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead, Blackwell, 2008) and The politics of rights: dilemmas for feminist praxis (co-edited with Maxine Molyneux, Routledge, 2008). She is currently Director of the DFID-funded Research Programmeme Consortium Pathways of Women’s Empowerment.

 

Lisa McLaughlin

Lisa McLaughlin, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women’s Studies at Miami University-Ohio (USA). She teaches courses in global media and feminist media theory and practice. Lisa has several publications focusing on gender and the public sphere, transnational feminism, political economy, and women, work, and information and communication technologies for development, with most of her fieldwork conducted in Malaysia. She also is inaugural and continuing editor of the Routledge/Taylor and Francis journal Feminist Media Studies. Additionally, with a grant from the US Social Science Research Council, she has collaborated with women’s media community/advocacy groups to develop a programme titled the Women’s Media Equity Collaborative. She participated as a civil society expert at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Ministerial on The Future of the Internet Economy in Seoul (South Korea) and is a member of the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Committee (CSISAC) to the OECD. Lisa also was a delegate to the two-phase World Summit on the Information Society, representing the Union for Democratic Communications.

 

Parminder Jeet Singh

Parminder Jeet Singh worked for nearly a decade in the government, where he initiated innovative e-governance projects. During this time, in 2001, he co-authored the book, Government@Net: E-governance opportunities for India (Sage Publications). He has worked with many ICTD field projects, as well as in policy research and advocacy related to information society issues. At IT for Change, Parminder is the coordinator of a UNDP-funded field project, which aims to bring new ICTs to disadvantaged rural women, and is co-coordinator of IT for Change’s research and advocacy project ‘Information Society for the South’. Parminder is a member of the Strategy Council of the UN’s Global Alliance on ICTs and Development, and a Special Advisor to the Chair of the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum.