Kaoru Aoyama (Japan)
COE Fellow, Gender Law and Policy Center, Tohoku University/ Co-president, People’s Plan Study Group

Dr. Aoyama obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Essex, UK, in November 2005. She has specialized in issues of gender and sexuality, social inclusion/exclusion, trans-border migration, and sex work and trafficking while handling the multiple jobs of a contract researcher, an associate lecturer, a translator and a single mother. Striving to create theoretically and methodologically sound social research that will be useful for those being researched, she has been involved in team research projects including one on women returnee migrants in northern Thailand and another on migrant sex workers in Japan, both publicly funded and led by the migrants themselves. Also being co-president of a Tokyo based independent organization, People’s Plan Study Group, her civic activism revolves around the networking of socially committed academics and activists aiming for participatory democracy beyond national and other hierarchical borders in the Asian region. She has been an ARENA fellow since 1998.

Proposed Research Topic: Migrants in Sex Work as Reality: How Not to Divide Us into Criminals, Victims and Rescuers

Bina Sarkar Ellias (India)
Editor and Publisher of “Gallerie” magazine

Ms. Ellias is the editor of Gallerie, an award-winning global arts and ideas publication from India. Since 1997, she has been committed to generating critical awareness and understanding of cultures as interpreted through the arts, performing arts, essays, poetry, features on communities and people, cinema and photography. She is also a freelance writer and social observer, having written for national newspapers such as The Times of India Sunday Review, and had columns in the Indian Express and The Hindu.  She edited Fifty Years of Contemporary Indian Art, 1997, for the Mohile Parikh Centre for Visual Arts, Mumbai, and has designed catalogues as well as designed, edited and published books for artists, poets and photographers. Her chapbook of poems, The Room, was published by AarkArts, UK. She was recently felicitated in Tehran for her special issue “Contemporary Culture in Iran,” intended to generate understanding of a nation misrepresented in the world media. She has given talks and chaired discussions on art at events in India and overseas.

Proposed Research Topic: Freedom and Censorship/Blurring Boundaries

Petula Sik-ying Ho (Hong Kong, China)
Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong

Dr. Ho is one of the few recognized experts in the relatively uncharted territory of gender and sexuality studies in Hong Kong and China and also one of the very few critical voices for the promotion of an open discussion of sexuality and intimacy issues in Hong Kong society. She received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong before pursuing her Ph.D. in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex (UK). Her main research and teaching interests are in the area of homosexuality, gender and sexuality issues. She has made
contributions to the development of a dynamic theory of gender and sexuality to help problematize feminist theories and resist Western hegemonies through empirical case studies that connect discourse, cultural practices, political economy, and social change. Currently, she is co-hosting a phone-in program on FM MetroBroadcast, on relationship and intimacy issues. The local media frequently covers her analyses of current issues.

Proposed Research Topic: New social movements through a politics of iconogenesis

Huang Jiansheng (China)
Associate Professor, Yunnan Nationalities University

Dr. Huang is an associate professor at Yunnan Nationalities University (previously named “Yunnan Institute for Nationalities”), where he has taught English for 12 years. He studied with Fulbright scholars at Shanghai International Studies University. Later on, he received his M.phil and Ph.D. from the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Bergen, Norway, after studying there for eight years. He was team leader of the China-EU co-operative project “Sustainable Users’ Concept for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios (SUCCESS)” under the China-EU 5th Framework between September 2002 and August 2005. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the U.S.A (2004-2005). His current research mainly focuses on sustainability, guanxi and cultural issues, particularly those in rural China.

Proposed Research Topic: The Village Systems Supporting Sustainability: A Success Story from Du Jia, Yunnan

Sriprapha Petcharamesree (Thailand)
Lecturer, Office of Human Rights Studies and Social Development, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Mahidol University

After receiving her first degree in political science from Thammasat University, Dr. Petcharamesree received her D.E.A. and Ph.D. in international politics from the University of Paris-X Nanterre, France. Her first formal contact with human rights works started when she served as a social worker for the UNICEF's Emergency Operations for Cambodian Refugees. She joined the Department of Technical and Economic Cooperation, and then Mahidol University where she remains till present.  Until June 2007 she chaired the first International Master Program in Human Rights ever established in Thailand and in Southeast Asia. Active in the human rights field both in the academic community and among human rights activists, both at the national and regional level, she works closely with NGOs, grassroots people, marginalized groups, ethnic minorities, migrant workers, and asylum seekers. Her recent works focus mainly on issues of citizenship, economic, social and cultural rights, community rights, and human rights education at the grassroots level.

Proposed Research Topic: Migrants and access to membership goods