Editorial Collective
Maureen Freely was born in the US, raised in Turkey, and educated at Harvard. A professor at the University of Warwick and the author of seven novels, she is currently the President of English PEN. She has translated or co-translated a number of Turkish memoirs and classics, as well as five books by the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk.
Pragna Patel is a founding member and current director of Southall Black Sisters, one of the UK’s leading anti-racist and feminist organisations. She is a trained lawyer and has been in the forefront of key cases and campaigning milestones in the history of SBS.
Rashmi Varma teaches English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK. She is the author of The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (2011) and of the forthcoming Modern Tribal: Representing Indigeneity in Postcolonial India. She has published numerous essays on feminist theory, activism and literature. She lives in London and has been a member of Awaaz-South Asia Watch and Women Against Fundamentalism.
Georgie Wemyss is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging. She completed her D.Phil thesis about Britishness and belonging at the University of Sussex whilst teaching social anthropology to adults returning to education in East London. During the 1980s she worked as a youth worker in Tower Hamlets and lived in India and Bangladesh where she studied at the Bangla Academy. She became active in Women against Fundamentalism in 1989. Her book, The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging explores how differing narratives of Britishness obscure colonial histories in ways that work against the belonging of second and third generation British citizens in the present. She was an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Migration at the University of Surrey from 2005 to 2007 and Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College from 2007 to 2011.
Stephen Cowden is from Melbourne, Australia, and has lived in the UK since 1986. He has been involved in left, anti-racist and trade union activism and he has worked as Social Worker from 1992. In 2001 became a Social Work lecturer at Coventry University, teaching sociology and ethics. His research is concerned with Social Work ethics, Critical Pedagogy and the Sociology of Multiculturalism and Religious Fundamentalism. In 2013 he published (with Gurnam Singh) Acts of Knowing: Critical Pedagogy In, Against and Beyond the University.
Yasmin Rehman is a freelance consultant and researcher. She is currently working with a number of women’s organisations including Welsh Women’s Aid, providing training on equalities, diversity and inclusion for higher education institutions and an independent panel member reviewing past serious case reviews. Yasmin has worked for 30 years predominantly on violence against women, race, faith and gender, and human rights. She co-edited a book, Moving in the Shadows, which examines violence experienced by minority women and girls in the UK. She is working on a second book looking at polygamous marriage and its links to violence and abuse of women and girls. Yasmin is currently a Board member of EVAW (End Violence Against Women Coalition) and a Trustee of the Centre for Secular Space.
Gita Sahgal is a writer and journalist on issues of feminism, fundamentalism, and racism, a director of prize-winning documentary films, and a women's rights and human rights activist.
Nira Yuval-Davis is a diasporic Israeli Jewish sociologist and an anti-racist anti-fundamentalist feminist. She is a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism and the International Research Network on Women in Militarized Conflict Zones. Currently she is the Director of the research centre on Migration Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London.
Rebecca Durand lives in east London and teaches English for Speakers of other Languages (ESOL) at New City College, Tower Hamlets. She is an activist and trade unionist.
