Dr. Dilip Simeon

Dilip Simeon joined Delhi University in 1966. In 1970 he joined the Naxalite movement and left it in 1972 in the wake of the Bangladesh crisis. In 1974 he joined the History Department of Ramjas College, where he taught until 1994. His doctoral dissertation on the labour movement of Bihar was published in 1995, under the title “The Politics of Labour under Late Colonialism”.

In 1988 he was elected to the Academic Council of the University of Delhi. From 1984 till 1992 he participated in a campaign for communal harmony and justice for the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage through a citizen's organisation named the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan. Dilip has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Surat, Sussex, Chicago, Leiden and Princeton. From 1998 till 2003 he worked as Research Fellow on conflict with Oxfam (India) Trust. He has published extensively on historical and political issues in various newspapers and academic journals. Dilip is now chairperson of the Aman Trust, which works to understand and reduce violent social conflict.

His first novel, Revolution Highway, was published by Penguin India in September 2010.

Mr. Rahul Roy

Rahul Roy is an independent documentary film maker and heads an organisation AKAR based in New Delhi. His work has focused on communalism, labour and masculinities. His films have been widely screened internationally and won several awards. Besides film making he has been researching and writing on masculinities. His graphic book on masculinities titled – A Little Book on Men, was published by Yoda Press. He has been contributing in generating knowledge and discourse around the issues of engaging boys and men in gender equality and masculinities in South Asia.

He completed his masters in Film and TV production from the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 1987

Dr. Ambreen Ahmad

Dr. Ambreen Ahmad is a Diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology with an additional sub specialisation in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She is currently in private practice in Islamabad. She also serves as a Working Member of the Board of Governors and an Advisor to Rozan, an Islamabad based NGO working on issues of Emotional Health, Gender, and Violence against Women and Children. Dr. Ahmad’s involvement and commitment dates back to 1989 when she started actively working to raise awareness and create ownership of sensitive issues such as Rape and Child Sexual Abuse, topics which were considered taboo in Pakistan. She is the Founder Member of two community based organizations and has facilitated numerous workshops and Training of Trainers, both nationally as well as regionally in South Asia and Africa. In her work, she has always placed special emphasis on the importance Self Awareness as a critical first step towards real and sustainable change.

Ms. Maria Rashid

Maria Rashid is the Executive Director of ROZAN, a NGO working on issues related to emotional and psychological health, gender, violence against women and children, and the psychological and reproductive health of adolescents. She has been working in the area of gender justice and women’s rights for more than 10 years in Pakistan and South Asia. She has got expertise in the area of emotional and psychological health and gender-based violence and authored several articles and publication in the area of women’s empowerment.

She had played key role in initiating momentum on working with boys and men in gender equality in Pakistan and South Asia. ROZAN is currently holding the secretariat of the MenEngage Alliance Pakistan’s secretariat. Maria is also the member of the Steering Committee of South Asian Network to Address Masculinities (SANAM).

She holds post-graduate degree on Psychological Counselling from University of Karachi.

Dr. Nighat Said Khan

Nighat Said Khan is the Executive Director of the ASR Resource Centre; the Dean of Studies, Institute of Women’s Studies, Lahore and is responsible for the South Asian Women for Peace Training and Action Network. Nighat has been active in the women’s movement in Pakistan, in South Asia and at the global level and has been a part of the peoples’ movement in the region particularly the peace movement. Her approach to activism is premised on the dialectical relationship of action and theory and she makes every effort to locate her activism within conceptual parameters while bringing activist experiences to bear on her academic interests. Nighat has a wide experience of teaching and training at the South Asian level, as a member of several regional networks and initiatives as well as her work within ASR, IWSL, and SAWP all of which include faculty, students and participants from South Asia.

Nighat Khan has a BA from Columbia University in New York; an MA from Manchester University in the UK; an MA from Punjab University and has done her doctoral work at Manchester University in the Department of Sociology.

Dr. Charu Gupta

Charu Gupta is an Associate Professor of History at Delhi University. She did her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She has been a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, Delhi, a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale University, a Rama Watamull Distinguished Indian Visiting Scholar at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, a Visiting Faculty at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, New York, an Asia Fellow of the Asian Scholarship Foundation, Thailand, a Visiting Fellow at the Welcome Institute, London, and a South Asian Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford. She has presented papers in a large number of national and international seminars and conferences. Her publications include the book Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (co-published by Permanent Black, Delhi & Palgrave, New York, 2002) and Contested Coastlines: Fisher-folk, Nations and Borders in South Asia (Rutledge, Delhi and London, 2008), and several articles on gender, masculinity, sexuality, fundamentalism and nationalism in various national and international journals. She is currently working on ‘Dalit Masculinities and Femininities’.

Dr. Abhijit Das

Abhijit Das is Director of Centre for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ) a policy research and advocacy institution around health and human rights and men and gender equality in India. He is also a Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Global Health, at the University of Washington in Seattle USA. He has worked for over fifteen years as a community based clinician and manager of community based health and development programs in North India.

Over the last decade he has been working on health policy especially in the area of gender, health rights and accountability. He works in an advisory capacity with the ministry of health at the Central level and in different states in India. He has been involved in setting up MASVAW ( Men’s Action for Stopping Violence Against Women) a network of men working on gender equality and responding to the issue of violence against women which is now active in five states across India. Abhijit is also founder member of Health-watch Forum a national network working on sexual reproductive health issues, and MenEngage a global alliance on men and gender equality.

Mr. Sayed Saikh Imtiaz

Sayed Saikh Imtiaz is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Women and Gender Studies in University in Dhaka. He has been teaching in Women and Gender Studies department for last 8 years and conducted various researches on Masculinities & Sexuality in Bangladesh and South Asia. He is also involved in an organisation named AGAMI that is currently setting up programs with male students to create awareness on GBV and HIV/AIDS.

He is in the final stage for his doctoral degree from Amsterdam University on 'Masculinity, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS response in Bangladesh'.

Mr. M. Nazrul Islam

M. Nazrul Islam works as the Country Director for Bangladesh with Relief International, a US based non-profit organization which provides development assistance in more than 23 countries across Asia, Africa and Middle East. Nazrul has led development and management of numerous media access and human rights projects at RI with special focus on use of Information and Communication Technology, such as the Internet and SMS to advocate for human rights issues. His recent projects address Violence against Women with the goal to enhance the capacity of communities to reduce VAW at the grassroots levels in Bangladesh and to engage the local leaderships, educators, youth, media and ICT including SMS and online social networking. Earlier he managed RI’s multi year project Global Connections and Exchange which promoted global dialogue and cross cultural collaboration through use of technology. An important focus of the GCE program was empowerment of women and promotion of gender equality through technology and social media.

Nazrul earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Social Science from Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh and completed a post graduate program in Development Studies from Massey University in New Zealand.

Dr. Rubina Saigol

Rubina has been involved in activism on women and human rights in Pakistan and written extensively on critical theory and education, gender, nationalism, state, militarization, religious fundamentalism, development discourses and ethnic identities.  She has written books and articles in English and Urdu many of which have been published internationally and in South Asia.  Some of her books include Knowledge and Identity, Symbolic Violence, Ownership or Death, Education: Critical Perspectives.  She has co-edited volumes on feminism and gender which include Engendering the Nation-State, I and II, Locating the Self: perspectives on women and multiple identities, Aspects of Women and Development, and State of Social Sciences in the 1990s. Some of her papers include Militarization, Nation and Gender: women’s bodies as arenas of violent conflict; The Multiple Self: Pakhtoon Nationalism and Talibanization in Pakistan; Partitions of the Self: Mohajir women’s sense of self and nationhood; Yearning for Manliness: Masculinity in the poetry of Akbar Allahabadi and Iqbal; Enemies Within and Enemies Without: the besieged self in Pakistani textbooks; His Rights, Her Duties: citizen and mother in the civics discourse.

Rubina Saigol holds a doctoral degree In the Sociology of Education from the University of Rochester and a Master’s in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University.

Dr. Deepak Mehta

Deepak Mehta is an Associate Professor in Sociology Department in University of Delhi. His research interests centre around the study of material culture, the sociology of Muslim groups in India and the sociology of violence. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India (1996). He has authored (with Roma Chatterji) Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007) and edited (with Roma Chatterji) Riot Discourses.  (2007)

Deepak holds doctoral degree in Sociology from Delhi University.

Mr. Raziq Fahim

Raziq Fahim is the Director of College of Youth Activism and Development, Development (CYAAD), a space focused on bolstering youth to prevent them from militancy, violence and exclusion. Raziq has extensive experience in the field of development, education and peace building, ranging from the grassroots initiatives and activism to the policy level engagements, academic/research work and international exposure.

Raziq has been instrumental in integrating concepts and practices in to greater engagements and leading long term development programs effecting young men and women of isolated conflict effected communities. He conceived and experiment diverse innovative models and programs of development and education which have been replicated/adopted by government and other development partners.

Ultimately, Raziq gives youth the opportunity to receive civic education, supports their activism and enables them to deal with contemporary challenges and become agents of peaceful social transformation.

Dr. Sanjay Srivastava

Sanjay Srivastava is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. His key publications include 'Constructing Post-colonial India. National Character and the Doon School' (1998), 'Asia. Cultural Politics in the Global Age' (2001, co-author), 'Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes. Masculinities, Sexualities and Culture in South Asia' (2004. Contributing editor), and 'Passionate Modernity. Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India' (2007). 

Srivastava has also written background papers on issues for masculinities, sexualities and gender for non-academic contexts such as the UNDP-HDR for Asia-Pacific and has provided research assistance to NGO's working on these topics. He is currently editing a sexualities Reader for OUP and working on a book on Delhi.

Dr. Chandra Bhadra

Dr. Chandra Bhadra is a Professor of Gender Studies, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Her main area of interest is ‘doing research with women’ and to conduct gender related policy research. She is currently a Technical Gender Expert for SAARC Gender Info Base; which is a SAARC-UN Women (UNIFEM then) initiative for establishing regional repository of data/information on gender equality and the empowerment of women. She has conducted gender research as the team leader in the areas of microfinance, bonded labour, energy and natural resources, armed conflict and impact on women and migration for work. She has affiliation to South Asian feminist researchers’ groups and she is a core member representing Nepal in South Asian Feminist Researchers’ Association (SAFRA). She was also involved in South Asian research work on ‘impact of land and forestry policy on women’ and ‘impact of armed conflict on women’.

She is also involved in gender advocacy. She is the Nepal coordinator of South Asian Group for Gender Equality (SAGGE), which affiliates with GEAR in the UN gender architecture reform advocacy.

She has a doctoral degree in Gender Studies from Oregon State University, USA.

Mr. Satish Kumar Singh

Satish K Singh is the Deputy Director of Centre for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ), a policy research and advocacy institution around health and human rights and men and gender equality in India. He heads the works under the thematic area of Men and Gender Equality in CHSJ. He has been working on social justice issues for more than 26 years and on the issue of gender equality, masculinity, sexuality and gender based violence for more than 13 years. He is a very well known male facilitator and trainer on the issues of working with boys and men in gender justice, masculinity, & sexuality. He is the founder convener of a well known movement of men “Men’s Action to Stop Violence Against Women (MASVAW)” in Uttar Pradesh in India. He played a lead role in establishing several institutions in India, including SAHAYOG, HUMSAFAR, Forum to Engage Men (FEM) and MenEngage.

Satish holds post-graduate degree in Political Sciences from Kashi Vidhya Peeth in 1985.

Ms. Poonam Kathuria

Poonam Kathuria, the founder and executive secretary of SWATI, works for women’s empowerment and leadership in Gujarat. She is a post graduate in Economics and has a fellow ship in Social work Management. 

She specialises in organization development – capacity, perspective building trainings in NGOs, women’s groups; gender related issues – health, gender based violence. Poonam has contributed a number of articles on experience and research carried out in the area of violence against women, male perceptions of violence against women and women and health. Advocating at state and national levels for effective implementation of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, she has recently developed and published a handbook on using PWDVA.

Under her leadership SWATI has pioneered the work with women’s justice committees, which are today well recognized platforms dealing with women‘s issues of violence and exploitation in the home and outside of it. She is active in working with men from a masculinities perspective and is a core member of FEM – Forum for Engaging with Men and of South Asian Network to Address Masculinities (SANAM).

Mr. Laxman Belbase

Laxman Belbase is the Advisor-Gender Issues of Save the Children Sweden-Regional Office for South and Central Asia and heading the programmes on working with boys and men in gender justice in the region. He is a Social Justice activist, with experiences in both social and environmental sectors with a special focus in gender equity, fighting against gender-based violence and engaging boys/men for social justice. He has facilitated several trainings on engaging boys and men in gender justice, sexual and reproductive health & rights and knowledge management in Nepal and the region.

Laxman is also coordinating the MenEngage Alliance in South Asian and representing the regional alliance at the Global Executive and Steering Committees of the Global MenEngage Alliance. Further, he is coordinating the South Asian Network to Address Masculinities (SANAM).

Laxman holds post-graduate degree in Statistical Sciences in 2003 and environmental economics in 2007. He is currently pursuing post-graduate course on Psychological Counselling.

Mr. Habibur Rahman

Habibur Rahman is the Gender Equity and Diversity Advisor in CARE Bangladesh and one of the premier gender and diversity experts in Bangladesh working in the sector for over 16 years. His key areas of expertise are gender and diversity framework analysis, application and institutionalization; grievance management; capacity building, behaviour change & communication material development and networking.

Habib has got expertise in the areas of management, rights based programme development, advocacy and capacity building, & knowledge management. He has facilitated movement against domestic violence at the community level and incorporated the learning at the programmatic levels. Some of his major publications and BCC material are “Gender and Diversity Handbook” CARE Bangladesh, (2006); Translate Oxfam Gender Training Manual (2000); Women Empowerment and Men’s involvement in violence against women (video documentary).

He holds postgraduate degree in Political Science from Dhaka University, Bangladesh in 1985.

Mr. Anand K Pawar