Professor Claire Seaman is Reader in Enterprise and Family Business at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. She has published over 30 journal articles on family businesses in the UK, New Zealand and Latin America and is a regular contributor to family business conferences worldwide. Her recent book, The Modern Family Business, was developed with colleagues and published by Palgrave McMillan. She is a frequent speaker at gatherings of family businesses and professional advisors. This interaction enables her to share insights from evidence based research with practitioners, while ensuring that her research focuses on areas of importance to the family business community, and has lead directly to current research that focusses on the European Family Business Associations. Experiences and close interactions with business and business support agencies help keep her professional work rooted into the realties and complex dynamics of families in business who create enterprises that dominate the economic and societal landscape around the world.

Researching gender in the context of family business succession has lead to interesting insights in the little-researched area that looks at how mothers lead and later hand over the family business to their children. The role women play in agriculture, with particular reference to small farms in Scotland and Nepal, is another area of current research alongside research that considers vital but often less-visible role of women in the family businesses run by members of Scotland’s ethnic minority communities. In addition, Claire is supervising PhD and Professional Doctorate candidates exploring family businesses and business education in communities worldwide, often where gender roles and expectations are very different from those in the UK. Claire is a member of the Advisory Board of Family Business United Scotland and the Research Strategy Board for the Institute of Family Business.

Aizhan Salimzhanova is a researcher from Kazakhstan. Her research interests include Gender Studies, Green Economics, and Waste Management. She is a former director of the Research Institute for Social and Gender Studies in Kazakhstan and continues to collaborate as an affiliated researcher in this organization. Aizhan’s work was related to promoting, coordinating and initiating social and gender research and academic programs. Working together with UNDP Istanbul regional hub and UNDP Country Office Kazakhstan, Aizhan has been involved in the research on unpaid domestic work in Kazakhstan and gender equality issues in Central Asia, CIS, and Western Balkans. She has International experience of working and traineeship in Turkey and France. Currently, Aizhan works as an economist (project leader on Waste Management), continues promoting gender equality issues in Kazakhstan, and is about to finish her Ph.D. dissertation on Green Economics at Istanbul Technical University.

Iti Tyagi is a Certified Organizational Behaviour Strategist and award winning Leadership Mentor. She is currently designated as Software Designer for ICT Healthcare (Netherlands). Apart from her job, she persues freelance research on various agendas such as Women Disability, Gender Bias, Pay Gaps etc. She is also actively involved in Social Media Strategy and Art awareness, and actively guides on various social platforms.

Dr Sangita Shrestha is a communications professional and a researcher.

She has experience of working with a range of international development organizations including INASP, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Lutheran World Federation. In addition to over 12 years of international experience in communications and media relations, she is also an active researcher and has authored/co-authored many publications. Sangita also has experience of working with the University of Surrey and Centre for Nepal Studies UK (CNSUK) as a Researcher and at the University of Bath as a Visiting Lecturer for EdD Unit, Philosophy
of Educational Research.

Sangita holds a PhD in Sociology (Development Communication) from University of Surrey (UK), a Master’s degree in Anthropology (Nepal) and a Diploma in Information Technology (Australia).

Federica Bressan (1981) is a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University, where she leads a research project on interactive installation art under the Marie Curie funding programme H2020-MSCA-IF-2015 (http://daphnet.federicabressan.com/). She holds an MD in Musicology and a PhD in Computer Science. She previously held a post-doctoral research position at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy, where she coordinated the laboratory for sound preservation and restoration (http://smc.dei.unipd.it/).

Arianna is a development economist specialising in International Development and Gender issues. She works internationally for different non-profit organizations in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. She supports State institutions in designing more inclusive policies and implement projects that focus on poverty-reduction strategies in respect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She attempts to contribute to both sustainable economic growth and to the realization of human capabilities that encourage innovative forms of personal and social evolution, rooted in social and gender justice. In 2012 she co-founded the INGO Nove Onlus (noveonlus.org) active in Afghanistan on a number of  out-of-the-box projects such as the start-up ‘Pink Shuttle’ the first and only service in the country driven uniquely by female drivers for female passengers. Her living-theory-based doctoral research at the University of Lancaster/Cumbria focuses on how to contribute to the realization of the human capabilities of the people she is working with in developing countries. She is also a peer-reviewer of the Educational Journal of Living Theories ( www.ejolts.org). 

I am Pragya Singh, from India. I did my graduation from University of Delhi, currently I am about to finish my Maters in Comparative Literature from Hyderabad Central University, Hyderabad, India.

Be fearless, be confident, nobody can put you down is something I believe in. I carry my femininity and sexuality on my sleeves. Proud to be a woman. I have determined to work towards gender equality and bring whatever possible change I can in the society. For a woman it is very important to assert her identity and have agency. Do not let anyone else speak for you, speak for yourself.  Assertion of selfhood is Feminism for me. Be proud of who you are. Shun patriarchy!, shun inequality!  And this must begin at the personal level inside family, inside bedrooms, inside closed walls.

For me freedom is as essential as food or water. I love living fearlessly. I love to sing and dance. Dance is a very beautiful way of expression, I am crazy and fearless when on the floor. Red is my favourite color, it is a perfect blend of confidence, beauty, power and sexuality and I love it. I love to be raw and real, useless sophistication has no place in my life.

Dr Maria Célia Mundim is a post-doctoral researcher at Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas, Brazil. She is a member of the research group “Psychological Evaluation of Human Potential” at the same instituition and collaborator to the research group “Critical Thought” at Salamanca University (Spain). She also collaborates with a researcher from the University of Minho (Portugal) and a researcher from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). Her publications entail themes about women, creativity and talent, which can be seen at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria_Mundim2. She is also a founding member of the Brazilian Association of Creativity and Innovation.

Dr Skye Saunders is a legal academic from the Australian National University and is an advocate for issues of sexual harassment and bullying in Australia. With a particular interest in gendered harm in rural communities, she is the author of the book, Whispers from the Bush – The Workplace Sexual Harassment of Australian Rural Women. In collaboration with the Victorian Womens’ Trust, Skye has just recently finished making a short film based on Whispers from the Bush called ‘Grace Under Fire’. Skye is also the Acting Director of the Australian National University’s professional legal education programs and has formerly practised as a solicitor in the area of Employment/ Discrimination Law in Canberra. She is a regular speaker at conferences and events, both in Australia and internationally.

Dr Amalia Verdu is a law researcher from Spain teaching and researching at the University of Turku in Finland. She teaches gender and law from a critical legal perspective to challenge the neutrality, universality and objectivity of  law. The core of her research lies in the study of the concept of gender in law and the influence of gender in the construction of the legal person.

She is part of ASLA project ( Actors, Structures and Law ) studying law as a gendering practice. https://blogit.utu.fi/asla/

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Dr Nicoletta Policek is an Associate Professor in Policing and Criminology at the University of Cumbria. She brings a wealth of experience in the field of criminology and justice issues, policy making, strategic planning and education. She has the unique combination of extensive experience in conducting participatory action oriented research, and developing and implementing programs and policies.

She had an active research agenda for more than 20 years, covering a broad array of research in policing, courts and corrections, including adult and juvenile drug treatment, prison industries, human trafficking and sex work, terrorism and organised crime.

Broadly, her current academic work aims to deconstruct historical and existing theoretical models of displacement. Her   research aims to delineate how transformations in a global political economy shape the formulation of diasporic subjectivities, in particular children and women.

In particular, she is interested in participatory action research exploring the various ways in which marginalized groups such as for example sex workers, drug users, stateless people, individuals who are incarcerated and people living with HIV/AIDS, define (their experiences of) violence, discrimination and stigmatisation.

Dr Maria de Lourdes Machado-Taylor holds a degree in Economics from the University of Porto (Portugal), Post- Graduate Studies in Administration and a Ph.D in Business Administration, both degrees from the University of Minho (Portugal). She is a Senior Researcher Associate at the Center for Research on Higher Education Policies (CIPES) and currently works at the Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES) in Portugal. Her areas of research include Management, Leadership, Strategies, Higher Education Policies and Gender Studies.She has coordinated and contributed to multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research projects funded namely by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal), Capes (Brazil) and European Commission. She has received research scholarships from Gulbenkian Foundation and Fulbright (USA). She is the author and co-author of 12 books, editor of three books, author of 36 book chapters and several refereed journal articles published in European, Asian and American journals.

Dr Poshita Writes is a young cognitive scientist with research interests in Mathematical Cognition, Cognitive Aging, and Philosophy of Mathematics. After graduation in Cognitive Neuroscience with a specialization in neurodegeneration and behavioral statistics, Poshita moved from Oxford, England to Provence, France to continue her Ph.D. in the prestigious CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique) Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology. She is currently involved in understanding how different non-cognitive factors (e.g., social stereotypes) may modulate age-related changes in human cognition. In this context, she is conducting empirical and cross-cultural studies (between Europe and Asia) in the domain of complex arithmetic. Poshita advocates for greater gender parity in STEM fields, and is of the view that it is not just sufficient to encourage young women in STEM, it is equally important that girls and women see themselves represented in cultural milieus as well. Besides working as a full-time researcher, Poshita is a freelancer, writing on mindfulness, psychology, and spirituality.