Namrata Bali has organized urban and rural women into handicraft cooperatives in the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) for twenty-four years, and has been the Director of the SEWA Academy for nineteen years. She was the Secretary of SEWA from 2001 to 2003 and General Secretary from 2003 to 2005. She is now SEWA's Treasurer and a member of its Executive Committee; Chair and Editor of SEWA's fortnightly magazine, Anasooya; Editor of Aakashganga (girls magazine); and the Chair of Video SEWA Cooperative. She is also the Managing Trustee of the Indian Academy for Self-Employed Women. She specializes in textile design and labor and cooperatives' studies and has presented papers nationally and internationally on several issues involving working-class women. She also sits as a board member of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations (IFWEA).
Dorothy Sue Cobble is Distinguished Professor of History and Labor Studies at Rutgers University, specializing in the study of work, social movements, and social policy. Her award-winning books include, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004); The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor (Ithaca, 2007); and (with Linda Gordon and Astrid Henry) Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements (New York, 2014). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and, most recently, the Swedish Research Council. As the 2016 Kerstin Hesselgren Professor at Stockholm University, she is finishing a book on the global history of the American women's movements.
Petros Gougoulakis is Associate Professor of Education at Stockholm University. His research interests and publications are in the areas of popular adult education in Sweden, adult educators’ competencies in relation to prevailing discourses of lifelong learning, and educational quality and teaching in higher education. Since 1993, he has been teaching Educational Sciences in Teacher Education and has developed courses in adult learning. He has extensive experience of international research cooperation. In the autumn of 2014 he was a Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at Nagoya University, where he taught comparative education and conducted research on workplace-based learning in Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Sweden and Japan. He was appointed as external evaluator of Greece's tertiary education institutions (2013-2015) by the Hellenic Quality Assurance and Accreditation Agency for Higher Education.
John Grayson was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and Sheffield University. He worked for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and was Senior Tutor of Social History at Northern College for twenty years and taught at Sheffield Halla University. He has published widely in the fields of social history and the theory and practice of adult education. He is currently an independent activist researcher and serves as cochair of the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG). He writes regularly on asylum rights and antiracism for www.opendemocracy.net and the Institute for Race Relations’ news service.
Jonathan Grossman lectures in Sociology at the University of Cape Town. He is active in worker organization on campus and more broadly. His academic work focuses on working-class collective organization, action, and visions of the future. His most recently published work explores aspects of the struggle of workers in public-sector universities against outsourcing in the context of student mobilization.
Michael Hanagan received his B.A. from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan. His specialties include European labor history, French social history, and world history. He is the author of The Logic of Solidarity: Artisans and Industrial Workers in Three French Towns (Champagne, 1979) and Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford, 1989). He is most recently a coauthor of a world history textbook, Global Connections: Politics, Exchange and Social Life in World History (Cambridge, 2015).
Sascha Hosters is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University in the Department of German and East European Languages and Literatures. Before coming to the United States in 2010, he studied Media Studies and Political Science at the University of Regensburg in Germany. His academic research and interests are in media theory, film studies, and visual culture. He currently works as a freelance translator in Brooklyn, NY.
Andrew Jackson is the Head of the School of Humanities and is Senior Lecturer in History at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, UK. His research background is in history, geography, and rural sociology. Current research and publication interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century rural and urban change in Britain; theory and practice in community; local and regional history; public history; newspaper and media history; histories of Lincoln, Lincolnshire, and Devon; and the Lincolnshire poet Bernard Samuel Gilbert.
Jenny Jansson is Researcher of Government at Uppsala University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science. Currently, she is doing her postdoctorate work at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. Her work has appeared in journals such as Labor History, Slagmark, and Arbetarhistoria. She has also written several contributions to edited volumes on trade unionism and labor history. Her dissertation, “Manufacturing Consensus,” was awarded a prize for best dissertation of the year by Labor History.
Dimitra Lampropoulou teaches Contemporary History at the University of Athens. Her research interests, teaching work, and publications concern contemporary social and cultural history, history of social movements in the twentieth century, labor history, history of youth, oral history, and memory.
Asklak Leesland studied at the University of Oslo and then worked for three years in the early 1970s as a Research Assistant at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo on issues dealing with human rights and political development in South Africa. From 1977 until his retirement in 2012 he was in charge of international affairs for the Workers’ Education Association of Norway (AOF). During the 1980s he took leave from the AOF to work for the Norwegian government's refugee service among refugees from Vietnam. He was a member of the International Federation of Workers’ Education Associations’s Executive Board from 1992 until 2003 and served as the Acting Secretary General from 1992 until 2003. Leesland has served as a Lecturer on International Affairs in trade union education courses and also published a substantial number of articles on international affairs. He has been a member of numerous committees in the Labour Party and also served for a period in the 1970s on the Oslo City Council. He is now retired and lives in Oslo.
Lauren Marsh is the Junior Research Fellow for the Hugh Lawson Shearer Trade Union Education Institute (HLSTUEI). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute of Gender and Development at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in Sociology of Development from the University of the West Indies. In June 2014, he was commissioned as a Justice for the Peace for the parish of St. Andrew. He has published several articles on industrial relation trends in Jamaica and the Caribbean. He is the Deputy Chair for the West Indies Group of University Teachers (WIGUT) Professional Development Committee and an active member of the Planning Institute of Jamaica-Labour Market Information Committee. He has spearheaded initiatives geared toward community and educational development.
Michael Merrill is Director of Labor Education and Research Now (LEARN), the labor extension division of the Rutgers School for Management and Labor Relations in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His most recent publications include “The Gates of Thebes: What Workers Know of History,” in Revista História & Perspectivas 53 (2015); “How Capitalism Got Its Name” in Dissent (Fall, 2014); and “On Our Marx: Exploitation, Crisis, and Capitalism in the 21st Century,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 13 (2014).
Sérgio Paulo Morais is Associate Professor of History and Education at Federal University of Uberlandia in Brazil. He received his Ph.D. at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC/SP). He is author of, among other works, (in Poruguese, Incluídos? Pobreza e políticas compensatórias em um Brasil rico) [Included? Poverty and Compensatory Policies in a Rich Brazil] (Editorial Acadêmica Española, 2012). His works focus mainly on globalization, work, oral history, ways of life, and culture workers.
Danny Roberts is the Head of the Hugh Lawson Shearer Trade Union Education Institute at the Consortium for Social Development and Research, University of the West Indies, Open Campus. He is the coeditor (with Noel Cowell) of Road Map for Trade Unions: Relevance and Sustainability—Report on Stakeholders' Consultation (Kingston, 2012) and has authored several journal articles locally and regionally. A trade union official for some twenty years before joining the staff of the University of the West Indies, he served as President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Youth Committee and was until recently Vice President of the umbrella Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions. He received his country's fourth highest national award, the Order of Distinction, Commander Class, for his work in the field of trade unionism.
Leonard N. Rosenband is Professor Emeritus of History at Utah State University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University (1980) under the direction of Robert Darnton. Rosenband is the author of Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761–1805 (Baltimore, 2000), which appeared in French translation in 2005. He has coedited two books and published numerous articles, including “Comparing Combination Acts: French and English Papermaking in the Age of Revolution,” Social History 29 (2004), and “Jean-Baptiste Réveillon: A Man on the Make in Old Regime France,” French Historical Studies 20 (1997). He is currently completing a book entitled The Cosmopolitanism of the Industrial Revolution: Papermaking in England and France, 1650–1850.
Susan J. Schurman is Distinguished Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Recent publications include: (with A.E. Eaton and M. Chen) Informal Workers and Collective Action: Expanding the Boundaries of Organizing and Collective Bargaining (Ithaca, 2017); (with L. Soares) “Connecting the Dots: Creating a postsecondary education system for the 21 st century economy” in Finegold, D., M. Gatta, H. Salzman and S.J. Schurman (eds.) A US Skills System for the 21st Century: Innovations in Workforce Education and Development. Labor and Employment Research Association Research Volume (Ithaca, 2010); Schurman, S.J. “Labor Deserves Credit: The Popular Education Foundations of the National Labor College” in P. Finn and M. Finn (eds.) Teacher Education with an Attitude: Preparing Teachers to Educate Working Class Students in Their Collective Self Interest (Albany, 2007).
Gabriela Scodeller holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of La Plata (2009). She is Assistant Researcher of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET), currently working at the Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales (INCIHUSA), CCT Mendoza. Some of her recent works are “En búsqueda de un sindicalismo ‘moderno’: reformismo sindical y formación política en los años sesenta en Argentina,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, (September, 2015); “Latin American ‘Free Trade Unionism’ and the Cold War—An Analysis Based on Educational Policies,” Labor History 57 (2016); “Educar en derechos laborales: políticas y acciones desplegadas por la OIT durante los años 1950–1970,” in Regular y legislar el mundo obrero latinoamericano. Agencias, expertos, redes y políticas laborales en el siglo XX, ed. Laura Caruso and Andrés Stagnaro, forthcoming.
Ali Sipahi is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey. He recently received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where his studies focused on urban history, colonial intimacy, social distance, and collective violence in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. He coedited The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics (London and New York, 2016). He is currently doing research on ethnographic knowledge production of the post-World War Two period in Turkey.
Janaina Stronzake is an activist of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) of Brazil, a Professor of History at MST's Florestan Fernandes National School, and a Ph.D. student in Development Studies at Hegoa Institute, University of the País Basco. She organized (with Breno Bringel) the thematic dossier of the Revista Española de Desarrollo y Cooperación on food sovereignty and the right to food (2013). She researches food sovereignty, social movements, popular education, gender, and peasantry from the perspective of social history.
Judite Stronzake is a Brazilian activist of the Landless Workers’ Movement. She is Assistant Professor of Education in Social Sciences at Federal University of Grande Dourados, Brazil. She holds a master's degree in Latin American Integration Sciences from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is a Ph.D. student of Latin American Agrarian Sciences at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. She is a member of the research group Modes of Production and Social Antagonisms at the University of Brasília (UNB) and is a founding member of Hong Kong Global University. She researches rural social movements, popular education, capitalism, territory, and indigenism.
Marcel van der Linden is Senior Research Fellow of the International Institute of Social History, Professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam, and President of the International Social History Association. He is a cofounder of the Association of Indian Labour Historians (1996), the European Labour History Network (2013), and the Global Labour History Network (2015).
Célia Regina Vendramini is Professor of Education in the Graduate Program at the Federal University at Santa Catarina, Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from the Federal University of São Carlos (1997), and completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Lisbon (2005) and Cornell University (2013). She is a researcher for the National Scientific and Technological Development Council and has written articles and books about the relationship between education, work, and social movements.