Aída Hernández Castillo has a PhD in Anthropology (Stanford University 1996) and is a researcher-professor in the Center for High Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) at Mexico City. She has carried out research projects in different regions of the state of Chiapas with Mexican peasants and Guatemalan refugees and published three books and several articles on gender, ethnic identity, legal anthropology and religion. As a feminist, she has been a member of a Woman's organization since 1989, that works with Mayan woman. In 1997, she won a National Prize in journalism for an essay on the impact of the war on indigenous women and one of her books won the Fray Bernardino de Sahagún national prize for the best social anthropology research.

Maxine Molyneux has written extensively in the fields of feminist theory, political sociology and development studies. She has a Doctorate in Sociology from the University of Essex and now lectures at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London. She has acted as consultant to the UN, OXFAM and the Department for International Development (UK) for which she and Sian Lazar recently prepared a four country report on Participation and Rights Based Development in Latin America. She has two books appearing in 2000: Women's Movements in International Perspective; and (with E. Dore eds.) The Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America. She is currently preparing an edited collection with Nikky Craske entitled Gender and Justice in Latin America to be published by Macmillan in 2001.

Afsaneh Najmabadi is Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College. Her publications include The Story of Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, forthcoming November 1998). She also writes on contemporary issues of feminism in Iran and is currently working on a book Male Lions and Female Suns: The Gendered Tropes of Iranian Modernity.

Rosalind Petchesky is Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the founder and former international coordinator of the International Reproductive Rights Research Action Group (IRRRAG). Her published books and articles have attempted to put issues of reproductive and sexual rights in a larger social and political framework. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Award and also a practitioner of kickboxing.

V.K. Ramachandran is a development economist and Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. He has been on the faculties of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, UNU/WIDER and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, and a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies. His areas of research include agricultural labour and agrarian relations in India, Kerala's development experience and elementary school education in India.

Shahra Razavi is a Project Leader at UNRISD. She is currently coordinating the Institute's comparative projects on "Agrarian Change, Gender and Land Rights" and "Globalization, export-oriented employment for women and social policy", and is also working in the area of women and democratization. She is the editor of the book, Gendered Poverty and Well-Being (Blackwells, 2000), and co-editor, with Carol Miller, of Missionaries and Mandarins: Feminist Engagement with Development Institutions (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1998).

Veronica Schild is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. Born in Chile, she studied in the United States and Canada, obtaining a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto. She is the author of articles on the Chilean women's movement in a time of political transition, and most recently on gendered citizenship formation in neoliberal Latin American contexts. She is currently working on a book on the women's movement and neoliberal state formation in Chile.

Aili Mari Tripp is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her publications include Women and Politics in Uganda (2000), Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (1997), and a co-edited volume with Marja-Liisa Swantz, What Went Right in Tanzania? People's Responses to Directed Development (1996). She is currently writing a book on women and politics in Africa with Joy Kwesiga and has published numerous articles and chapters on the politics of ethnicity and religion in Africa; economic and political reform in Africa; and transformations of associational life in Africa.