Antelak Al-Mutawakel, PhD, teaches English literature and gender and development courses at Sana'a University, Yemen. She is a lecturer at the English Department and the head of the Higher Study Department at the Gender Development Research and Study Centre. Her PhD “Gender and the Writing of Yemeni Women’s Writers” granted form Tilburg University was considered to be a pilot academic study about Yemeni women writers form a gender perspective. She is one of the co-founder and the administrative board chairperson of the Youth Leadership Development Foundation, a non-profit NGO, whose aim is to increase youth participation in social, political and economic aspects with focus on young women and the underprivileged. She has published her PhD in a book by Tilburg University Publish House, she also published an article, “Self Liberty and National Struggle in Old Yemeni Women’s Short Stories,” both in English and Arabic.

Dr. Zahra Al-Saqqaf teaches English literature at the Faculty of Education, University of Aden. Her MA dissertation and Ph. D. thesis discuss issues of female self-fulfilment and self-empowerment, migration and the construction of female gender identity, and mother-son and mother-daughter relationships. Arabic-English comparative and contrastive studies is another field of research in which she participated with papers in international conferences. She published translated short stories and participated in editing "Almahjar", a magazine published by the Arab Association in Singapore.

Dr. Ali Ahmed Zain Al-Sagaf teaches econometrics, demography and statistics at the University of Aden. He is the head of the Department of Statistics and member of the Academic Council at the Woman’s Research & Training Centre of the University of Aden. His main fields of research are population and development, family planning, poverty and gender issues. In his PhD thesis, he examined the impact of women status on fertility and mortality transition in Yemen. He has published a number of papers in referred research journals of Aden University related to population and sustainable development, female economic activity, family planning, poverty, determinants of age at marriage and onset of fertility in Yemen He participated successfully in a three-week course in Gender Training in September 2005 at Larenstain University, the Netherlands. Recently, he is coordinator of the World Bank Project, Evaluation and Development of Higher Education in Yemen, and expert of UNFP (Yemen).

Dr. Dima Dabbous-Sensenig is director of the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) and assistant professor of communication at the Lebanese American University, specialized in the fields of media law and gender studies. She has published several scholarly articles on broadcast policies and regulation in the Arab World, with particular emphasis on public service broadcasting, cultural diversity, and the effects of the WTO on cultural production and exchange. She is currently doing research on critical discourse analysis, gender, media, and religion; and the portrayal of confessional violence on Lebanese private television stations. As of 2002, she has been active as an expert consultant on media and gender-sensitive communication policies in the Arab World in working groups organized by the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW). She is also a founding member of ATTAC Liban and chair of the ATTAC working group on Cultural Diversity in the Arab World.

Prof. Moha Ennaji is one of Morocco’s leading linguists with research interests in gender issues, migration, and civil society. With a PhD from the University of Essex in Linguistics (1982), he is Full Professor at the Faculty of Letters, University of Fez, where he was Chair of the English Department from 1988-1994. He is currently the Director of the Doctoral Program in Linguistics and Gender Studies, and Director of the international journal Languages and Linguistics, published in Morocco since 1998. Dr. Ennaji is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles on language, culture, education, migration, civil society and gender. He has co-authored with F. Sadiqi a book titled Migration and Gender in Morocco, to appear in November 2007 in Africa World Press (US). He has also edited a new book titled “Migration et Diversité Culturelle (2007). His most recent books are Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (Springer, 2005), A Grammar of Amazigh (2004) co-authored with Fatima Sadiqi, A Grammar of Moroccan Arabic (2004), co-authored. His most recent articles are: “Arabic Sociolinguistics and Cultural Diversity in Morocco” (2006, Illinois), and “The Effects of Male Migration on Women Left Behind”, co-authored with F. Sadiqi (Lisbon).

Prof. Mohammed Moubtassime, studied Linguistics, Literature, Issues on Modern Culture(s) and Literary Theory related to post-colonial literature at the University of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fes- Morocco. .He teaches Language Skills, Writing Skills, English for Specific Purposes (ESP related to Business, Tourism, Military Field), Research Methodology and ICT for the doctoral programme within Gender Studies Master Unit and Staff Development Unit. He is course coordinator of ESP and ICT of the English Studies and Communication Unit at the Faculty of Humanities in Fes- Morocco. His main fields of research are Humanitarian Values, migration and gender, Women Mainstreaming, Project Planning and Monitoring, Women and Migration and International Humanitarian Law. He is co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Centre of ISIS for Women and the Centre for Studies and Research on Women Research on Women and Gender at the University of Fes. He is the Vice-president of the South- North Civilisation Dialogue Centre. His most recent publications are The Grammar of Moroccan Arabic, Anthology of Moroccan Poetry, together with a number of articles on  “Eliminating Violence against Women and the New Technology”, “Women Empowerment and Leadership within a Team”. He is co-organizer of  the Amazigh (Berber) Festival in Fès, the National Conference on Berber culture, International Conference on "Mediterranean Women and their Rights", the International Conference on "Migration and Cultural Diversity", the International Conference on Mediterranean Women, the International Conference on Civil Society and Sustainable Development, the International Conference on Women and Education, the International Conference on Women and Development, the  Conference on Feminist Movements, and Member of the Editorial Board of Languages and Linguistics. Moreover, he is currently the National Coordinator of the Fundamental Principles and Humanitarian Values Department and The National Coordinator of the Dissemination Department of International Humanitarian Law at the Moroccan Red Crescent, a national association auxiliary to the public authority and affiliated to the International Federation of the Red cross and Red Crescent. He is a partner of the project ‚Gender and Politics‘ within the German-Arab University Dialogue programme.

Dr. Lydia Potts teaches political science, intercultural education and women’s and gender studies at the University of Oldenburg. She directs the working group ‚Migration-Gender-Politics‘ and is course coordinator or the Joint Master Migration and Intercultural Relations. Her main fields of research are global migration and gender, migrant families, migration and ageing, and travel literature by women. She was a visiting professor in the USA and held an HCM-fellowship of the European Gender Research Laboratory at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1995. She is co-founder of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Research on Women and Gender at the University of Oldenburg. Her books include The World Labour Market: A History of Migration; Frauen – Flucht – Asyl (co-ed. with B. Prasske), Womens‘ Studies im internationalen Vergleich (co-ed. with H. Fleßner/R. Kurth/M. Kriszio) and Societies in Transition: Challenges to Women’s and Gender Studies (co-ed. with H. Fleßner).

Martina Kamp, MA, studied Middle Eastern history, international relations and Islamic sciences at the University of Hamburg. In her Ph.D. thesis, she examines gendered and communalized citizenship in the Iraq from 1921 to the present. She has published on the Iraqi women’s organizations, the reconstruction of gender relations in post-Ba‘th Iraq, gender studies on the Mashreq and Maghreb, and the conflict between Libya and the UN. Her most recent publication in English is “Organizing Ideologies of Gender, Class and Ethnicity: The Pre-revolutionary Women’s Movements in Iraq“ in Women and Gender in the Middle East and Islamic World Today. Currently, she is coordinator of the project ‚Gender and Politics‘ within the German-Arab University Dialogue program, a cooperation of four Arab gender studies centers, focusing on gender, citizenship and violence, based at the working group Migration-Gender-Politics at the University of Oldenburg. Kamp is a founding member and a spokes person of the AK Gender, a network within the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO).

Dr. Fatima Sadiqi has taught theoretical linguistics, Berber linguistics, language, culture and gender and Islamic studies in Moroccan, European and American universities. Her main interests are language and gender, comparative feminisms, Berber language and women, and migration. She has written 4 single-authored books, co-authored, co-edited, and co-translated others. She has also published international articles on Moroccan languages and Moroccan women’s issues. She is Editor-in-Chief of Languages and Linguistics, an international journal, and serves on the editorial board of the Language and Gender, the first international journal in the discipline. Fatima Sadiqi has held Fulbright Visiting Scholars at four US universities, and has been serving as President Founder of the Centre for Studies and Research on Women, current President of the ISIS Center for Women and Development, Director Founder of the first graduate unit “Gender Studies”, and National Coordinator of SafetyNET. She has organized five international conferences and served on a wide variety of national and international committees such as the Language Based Area Studies Initiative for China, Japan, Eastern Europe and the Arabic Speaking World. Fatima Sadiqi is currently a Research Associate at Harvard University where she lectures and writes on Language, Gender and Islam in North Africa.