Solidarity Work

SWOT Team

THE SOLIDARITY WOMEN ORGANIZING TEAM (a.k.a SWOT):

Givens, Sheila is a first year graduate student in the department of History at UC Riverside working on her MA. After completing her undergraduate work in Sociology at UCR, she worked with youth in the town of Hemet, CA through a community organization. She is currently a member of the editorial team of the new feminist and radical zine "Salty". She spends most of her time balancing energies between her family and work and enjoys a champagne cocktail when she has the chance. Her family includes her husband, her two boys (ages 16 & 12) and her mother who is now an immediate and permanent part of her family nucleus. While readjusting to the regime of being a student again, she is also a part-time nurse who cares for adult and pediatric patients who are ventilator dependent. One of her primary interests includes assisting or organizing in support of issues which will help bring about change and draw attention to the struggles of women.

Lozon, Laura is Assistant Director of the Center for Ideas and Society, UC Riverside. Among her many tasks is to help UCR faculty and students put together various interdisciplinary events on issues that bring together the world of ideas with the "real" world. As you can imagine, this is the administrative labor and skill that makes many of these events possible. She is many-armed! In her spare time, (if she has any), she enjoys crocheting, playing with her pup, and sipping fresh peach martinis with friends.

Sinha, Sucharita completed her undergraduate and post graduate work in Economics at the University Of Calcutta, India and then went on to get an MPhil in Development Policy from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, India. Her MPhil dissertation has been a study of female work participation rates in rural West Bengal, India, where despite the people oriented political focus women continue to be excluded from economic empowerment in an agro-dominated economy due to traditional barriers to female agricultural work. She is currently a fifth year graduate student in the department of Economics at the University of California Riverside. Her Ph.D. dissertation is a study of the gender dimension of economic development in a growing economy with deep rooted patriarchal biases. She is in particular studying the skewed juvenile sex ratios in India and (re) discovers economic growth not be a panacea for obliterating gender inequalities.

Stavropoulos, Tina is a fourth year graduate student in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is currently studying feminist theory, postcolonial theory, rhetoric and Victorian literature. She is particularly interested in the function of silence in activism and the complicated function of landscape in literature and resistance struggles. While completing her B.A. at the American College of Greece in Athens, she was exposed to a number of resistance movements active within the Balkans and the Middle East. While attending UCR, she has had the opportunity to bring her activism into conversation with academia and the community. She has organized and participated in workshops and conferences meant to raise awareness about creative resistance, indigenous struggles, and the effects of military occupation.

Vasquez, Edith Morris PhD is a mother, community advocate, teacher and writer. She is an adjunct lecturer of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at two Southern California Universities. Next year, she joins the faculty of the English and World Literature Department, at Pitzer College. She has written critical works on children's literature, women, international feminism, and translation.

Chatterjee, Piya is founding co-member and co-organizer of the community based organization, Dooars Jagron, North Bengal, India. Dooars Jagron is a CBO led by tea plantation women and their allies. It focuses on political and human rights literacy work. She is also Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Her book, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation was published by Duke University Press in 2001 and Zubaan, New Delhi in 2003. She likes drinking mojitos and cackling with friends; scolding her cat Rosa (of Luxembourg fame); and returning to the eastern Himalaya, her real home.

OUR SOLIDARITY SISTERS FROM WILD

Chlala, Youmna is a writer and visual artist, born in Beyrouth and currently living in San Francisco. She is the Associate Director at WILD for Human Rights and faculty at California College of the Arts. She is founder and editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} journal of literature and art. Youmna is a former Ralph J. Bunch Fellow and co-chair of Amnesty International’s Women’s Steering Committee. She is the co-founder of GirlSource, a media arts and economic empowerment organization of low-income, immigrant, and young women of color.

Dharmaraj, Krishanti is the Executive Director and the co-founder of Women’s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights (WILD), an organization advancing human rights in the United States, through the leadership of women and girls. Through her work at WILD, Krishanti develops strategies to impact public policy by utilizing international human rights treaties and through grassroots advocacy, and designs and conducts training on human rights and leadership. With her leadership San Francisco became the first city in the U.S. to pass legislation implementing an international human rights treaty (the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women [CEDAW]) to eliminate gender based discrimination against women, and also organized and co-hosted the first gathering of US human rights organizations in the US, that is now a formalized national Network. Krishanti is the co-founder of Sri Lanka Children’s fund, which aims to secure the health, safety and education of girls and boys affected by the civil war and the tsunami. Krishanti has lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad and has provided human rights training to community leaders, policy makers and educators across the US and in the UK, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Mexico and Guyana. She co-authored the book “making connections- human rights in the US” and co-edited “making rights real- implementing human rights standards in the United States”. Krishanti graduated from University of California at Berkeley, and has Masters degrees in International Relations and Business Administration, and she is a photographer. She is a Zen monk in training at the Chozen Ji Zen Temple in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dharmaraj is a native of Sri Lanka and now resides with her family in San Francisco, California.