Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor of Gender & Ethnic Studies at the University of Greenwich, London and Visiting Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Professor Yuval-Davis has written extensively on theoretical and empirical aspects of women, nationalism, racism, fundamentalism and citizenship in Europe, Israel and elsewhere. She is the author or co-author of ten books, including Gender and Nation, which has been translated into six languages.

R.W.Connell is University Professor of Education at the University of Sydney, formerly at the University of California-Santa Cruz and Macquarie University. Professor Connell is a researcher and theorist concerned with human experience, social dynamics, social justice and peace. He is the author of sixteen books, including Gender (Cambridge, Polity, 2002), The Men and the Boys (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000), Masculinities (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), Schools and Social Justice (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993), and Gender and Power (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1987).

Dr. Rose M. Brewer is Professor, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor, and past chair of the African American & African Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer also holds affiliated appointments in the Departments of Sociology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She received her M.A and Ph.D degrees in Sociology from Indiana University, and did post-doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on black families, race, class and gender, and public policy, publishing over 40 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly essays in these areas. She is the editor with Lisa Albrecht of Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. She is also co-editor of Is Academic Feminism Dead?: Theory in Practice (New York University Press, 2000), with the Social Justice Group, Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota. Her most recent co-authored book is The Color of Wealth (The New Press, 2006), which was selected as one of the top l0 books for 2006, receiving the Gustavus-Meyers Book Award for best books on bigotry and human rights.

Professor Brewer’s commitment to undergraduate education and her scholarly achievements have been widely recognized. She is one of ten University of Minnesota faculty recipients of the Morse-Alumni Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence and Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. She has also received the African American Learning Resources Center Award for Teaching Excellence, among numerous other awards. In 1999 she was inducted into the National Academy of Distinguished Teachers, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Professor Brewer has spent over a decade working on curriculum transformation and progressive pedagogy, and consults nationally on issues of race, class, and gender in the curriculum.

Rose Brewer defines herself as a scholar-activist. For over a decade, she has been a member of the board of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. She has also served on the board of United for a Fair Economy, and is a founding member of the Black Radical Congress.

ETHEL BROOKS is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. She is interested in the relations of gender, race, class, labor practices and nation-state formations, with a focus on South Asia, Central America and the United States. Her research explores areas of critical political economy, globalization, social movements, feminist theory, comparative sociology, nationalism, urban geographies and post-colonialism, with close attention to epistemology.  She is the author of Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women's Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and the co-editor of the special issue of WSQ on "Activisms."  Her current projects include Missing Pakistanis: Gender, Race and Citizenship after September 11 and Disrupting the Nation:  Romani Sexuality, Raced Bodies, Productivity, as well as a co-authored text on gender and globalization in sociology.

Diane Elson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex (UK). For almost 40 years, she has carried out research on gender and development, and is regarded as one of the 50 key thinkers on development – David Simon, ed., Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (Routledge, 2005). Her current research and teaching interests focus on global social change and the realization of human rights, with a particular focus on gender inequality and economic and social rights. Elson has served as a member of the U.N. Millennium Project Taskforce on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, and as vice-president of the International Association for Feminist Economics. From 1998 to 2000, she occupied the post of Special Advisor to the Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

A U.C. Berkeley sociologist, Arlie Hochschild is the author of The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, The Time Bind, The Commercialization of Intimate Life and the co-edited Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. She is the winner of the A.S.A. Jessie Bernard Award,  and the 2000 Public Understanding of Sociology Award. Three of her books   have been selected as “notable books of the year” by the New York Times Book Review, plays have been based on two and her work has been translated into 14 languages. She’s finishing a book on the Commodity Frontier. According to Professor Hochschild, we live on a commodity frontier. On one side of it, we find unpaid intimate life and on the other side, we find goods and activities we pay for. This frontier pushes forward into (and sometimes draws back from) many realms of modern life – the realms of the economy, sports, prisons, arts, education. In this series of talks, Professor Hochschild focuses on those paid services which deal with the intimate realm of life at each stage of the life cycle.  Here she draws on interviews with clients and their love coaches, wedding planners, sometimes gestational surrogates, potty-trainers, parenting consultants, nannies, elder care managers, and burial ash distributors. As the commodity frontier moves, it alters what we do, how we think and how we feel.  It is a frontier in mentality.  When we hire service providers, we set up an “avatar-like” relationship between ourselves, she argues, and events of symbolic importance to us.   We become as managers of our private lives. This creates a new challenge to the deepest paradigm underlying all emotional life. Commodification threatens to detach us from our personal symbols. Through what she calls “market mechanisms of defense” we intuitively re-attach ourselves to those symbols. Indeed she theorizes there is a meta-emotion-work of ‘attachment and detachment’ required in the world of an advancing commodity frontier. She illustrates various mechanisms of defense and re-attachment.  These, she argues, we need to live modern lives, and also need to see “through” in order to understand the larger forces that require us need them.

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NANCY FOLBRE is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford, 2009), Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Harvard, 2009), Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structures of Constraint (Routledge, 1994) and co-editor, with Michael Bittman, of Family Time: The Social Organization of Care (Routledge, 2004). Books she has written for a wider audience include Saving State U (New Press, 2010); The Field Guide to the U.S. Economy (with James Heintz and Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, New Press, 2006 and earlier editions), The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New Press, 2001), and The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual (with Randy Albelda, New Press, 1996). She currently coordinates a working group on care work sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. You can read her regular contribution to the New York Times Economix Blog at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nancy-folbre/

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