Marian Wright Edelman is Founder and President of the Children's Defense Fund. The first Black woman to be admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Mississippi in the mid-1960's. She served as Goodwill Ambassador for the 2001 World Conference Against Racism and is the author of several books including The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors.
Mahnaz Afkhami (Moderator) is Founder and President of Women’s Learning Partnership and former Minister of State for Women’s Affairs in Iran. In exile in the US, she has been a leading advocate of women’s rights internationally for the last three decades, having directed several organizations focused on advancing the status of women in Muslim societies. Her numerous publications include Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation and Women in Exile.
Prominent women leaders will explore the common values underlying the three religions, and the role of religion in conflict resolution and violence prevention.
They will address challenges facing the United States and the international community in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the US, and the need to build a global coalition for peace and tolerance.
In addition to WLP representatives, Mahnaz Afkhami and Marian Wright Edelman, the following individuals contribute:
Blu Greenberg is Co-Founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance and served as Chair of the first and second International Conferences on Feminism and Orthodoxy. An author and lecturer who has published widely on issues of
feminism, Orthodoxy, and the Jewish family, her books include On Women and Judaism: A View From Tradition and Black Bread: Poems After the Holocaust.
Azza Karam is Director of the Women's Program at Religions for Peace and has published and lectured extensively on the status of women's rights in Muslim societies, political Islam, democratization, and international gender issues. Her publications include: Women, Islamism and the State, Islam in a non-Pillarised Society and Transnational Political Islam (forthcoming).
This lecture, co-sponsored by Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) and Women's Learning Partnership (WLP) in partnership with several other feminist organizations, and co-hosted by McGill University’s Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, is a conversation with renowned feminist Charlotte Bunch on navigating the current era of global backlash against women's rights.
We invite you to join WLP and our partners at our event hosted in parallel to the United Nation's 67th Commission on the Status of Women on women's leadership, supporting gender equality in Afghanistan and Iran, and harnessing technology to advance women's rights. This year you can attend WLP’s CSW67 parallel event both in-person and online via livestream.
