Keynote Presenters include:

Theme 1 - women & exclusion

Professor Lesley Doyal

Lesley Doyal is Professor of Health and Social Care in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol and Visiting Professor in Public Health and Family Medicine in the University of Cape Town.  Her main areas of research are international health policy and gender and health and she has published very widely in these fields.

She has acted as a consultant to a wide range of international organisations including WHO, United Nations, Global Forum for Health Research, European Institute for Women’s Health and the Commonwealth Secretariat.  She is also active in advocacy for women’s health working for a number of NGO’s including WOMANKIND Worldwide.

Dr Helen McAvoy

Dr. Helen McAvoy graduated from Trinity College Dublin as a medical doctor in 1997 and worked for several years in both hospital and general practice. She completed her Masters in Health Promotion in NUI Galway and her thesis examined the role of day services for older people in rural Connemara . She has worked on a number of government programmes relating to ageing and older people. She is now working as Senior Policy Officer with the Institute of Public Health in Ireland focussing on the government’s health inequality agenda in Ireland and Northern Ireland. In this role, she has contributed to a number of reports focusing on inequalities in maternal and child health, food poverty, fuel poverty and inequalities in the border region.

Karen Meehan

Karen Meehan is the Manager of the Cross Border Women’s Health Network. Trained as a Nurse in Midwifery, she worked as a Concern Volunteer in Sudan between 1986 and1988.

Appointed in 1989 she was the first Manager of Derry Well Woman, a post she left in 2000 to develop Derry Well Woman’s cross border work.  She led the research programme which resulted in the publication in 2003 of "Other Borders" - a cross border health strategy for women in the North West of Ireland.

In 2005, on behalf of Derry Well Woman, she began the development of the Cross Border Women’s Health Network.  The Network, with a membership of 38 statutory and voluntary agencies from across the North West of Ireland, will publish Ireland’s first Cross Border Plan for Social Inclusion in August 2008.

Karen is Chair of the Western Health and Social Services Board, a position she has held since 2003.

Theme 2 - role of women in maintaining health and well-being in post conflict societies

Anu Pillay

Anu Pillay’s passion and motivation for her work is spurred by her personal experience of surviving violence, raising four children as a single parent, engaging in the struggle to end apartheid and educating herself. She began her professional life in 1981 when she started the first non-racial pre-school in the Eastern Cape. Her work over the past 25 years has focused on women, gender and development although life has taken her on many different career paths. She has experienced working in the private sector, the public sector and the development sector. She has recently expanded her work to include conflict management and transformation again focusing on women and gender. Anu has a well developed profile in the development sector of South Africa having worked for the last five years as the Southern Africa director for an international non-governmental organisation, Ashoka Innovators for the Public. She is currently with the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation managing their Southern Africa peacebuilding programme. She is also well known for her work with violence against women and is the co-founder and board member of Masimanyane Women’s Support Centre and Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy to End Violence Against Women (VAW). She has published many papers and articles on peace and VAW and recently contributed to and co-edited a book on conflict : ‘The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation which focuses on women and conflict in Africa.

Professor Sheila Meintjes

Professor Sheila Meintjes has lectured in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1989. She has a BA. Honours from Rhodes University, an MA in African Studies from the University of Sussex and a Ph.D in African History from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University.  She teaches African politics, political theory and feminist theory and politics. Her special interests are gender violence, post-conflict transformation and gender politics in South Africa.
 
She was a full-time Commissioner in the Commission on Gender Equality between May 2001 and March 2004, where she led the Commission’s governance programme and was responsible for the Commission in Gauteng Province. 

Professor Meintjes has been involved in feminist and women’s politics in South Africa since the 1970s. She is the Chairperson of Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre against Violence against Women and of Women’sNet, both NGOs that foster gender equality in different ways.

She has published widely on the politics of gender, on gender violence, including three co-edited books: The Aftermath: Women in post-conflict Transformation published by Zed Press (2002); One Woman, One Vote: the gender politics of elections published  by the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (2003);  and Women Writing Africa: the Southern Volume published by the Feminist Press and the University of the Witwatersrand Press (2003).

Professor Gillian Robinson

Professor Robinson is the Director of INCORE (International Conflict Research www.incore.ulster.ac.uk) at the University of Ulster and DIrector of ARK (a resource on social and political information on Northern Ireland www.ark.ac.uk).  She is the 2003 Eisenhower Fellow from Northern Ireland.  She has been involved in the monitoring of social attitudes in Northern Ireland since 1989 and co-directs the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey series.  Her research interests include social attitudes, gender roles, policy development in transition and research methodology including issues aroudn researching violent societies and comparative methods.  She has published extensively on these issues including six books and numerous articles.  Gilllian is part of a research team funded by the ESRC to carry out a project entitled "Re-imagining women’s security: a comparative study of South Africa, Northern Ireland and Lebanon".

 

• Perinatal Centre
• Two Alzheimer day Centres
• Trans-border nursing school with the hospitals of Monaco, Menton and Imperia in Italy