Witnesses Bios
Gita Sahgal, Amnesty International
Mindy Ran, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
Agnès Callamard, Article 19
Dr. Agnès Callamard is the executive director of ARTICLE XIX, an international human rights organisation specializing on freedom of expression and freedom of information. Agnès Callamard has evolved a distinguished career in human rights and humanitarian work.She is a former Chef de Cabinet for the Secretary General of Amnesty International, and as the organisation’s Research Policy Coordinator, she led Amnesty’s work on women’s human rights. Agnès has conducted human rights investigations, including on violence against women, in a large number of countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.She has founded and led HAP International (the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership) where she oversaw field trials in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Sierra Leone and created the first international self-regulatory body for humanitarian agencies committed to strengthening accountability to disaster-affected populations.Agnès has worked extensively in the field of international refugee movements with the Centre for Refugee Studies in Toronto.She has published broadly in the field of human rights, refugee movements and accountability.Her publications on women’s human rights have focused on gender and language, women in armed conflicts, refugee women, and gender-sensitive research methodology.Agnès holds a PhD in Political Science from The New School for Social Research in New York. http://www.article19.org
Dafna Lemish, WACC
Dr. Dafna Lemish is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research, teaching, writingand activism focus on gender representations and the role of media in the construction of gender identities, as well as on the role of media in children's lives. Her books include Children and television: A global perspective (Blackwell, forthcoming); Children and media at times of conflict and war (edited with Götz, forthcoming Hampton Press) Media and the make-believe worlds of children: When Harry Potter meets Pokémon in Disneyland (with Götz, Aidman, & Moon, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005); Media education around the globe: Policies and practices (edited with Tufte & Lavender, Hampton Press, 2003). Among other roles, she has served as the Chair of the Feminist Scholarship Division of the International Communication Association; was board member of The Israel Women Network; founding board member of the Israeli Association for Feminist Studies and Gender Research; founding board member of the Israeli Communication Association; and member of the Steering Committee of the Women Studies Forum and the Program for Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. She was founding Chair of the National Advisory Committee of Media Education in the Israeli School System for the Ministry of Education and the author of several textbooks on developing critical viewing skills. Dafna Lemish coordinated the GMMP project in Israel in 1995, 2000 and 2005, and is a member of the international steering committee of GMMP 2005. http://www.whomakesthenews.org and http://www.wacc.org.uk
Gita Sahgal, Amnesty International
Gita Sahgal is Head of the Gender Unit at Amnesty International. She had previously worked as a Director and Producer making current affairs programmes for BBC and Channel 4 and as an independent film maker in India. http://web.amnesty.org/actforwomen/index-eng
Mindy Ran, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)
Mindy Ran is an Amsterdam-based freelance journalist. She is currently a regular feature and documentary maker on a variety
of issues from art and social/cultural/political to science for RADIO NETHERLANDS (the Dutch international service) and a former contributor of regular news and features for THE EUROPEAN newspaper and international agency TCS/PUBLISHING PARTNERS, as well as a founding member of "Alien", a local English-language programme on issues of sex and sexuality for MVS RADIO, Amsterdam. For the past eight years she has served on the National Executive Council of the NUJ representing Continental Europe and as the National Executive Council Equality Representative. Within that capacity she has also represented the NUJ on an international basis through the International Federation of Journalists (Gender Council) since 2001 and has helped develop policy and contributed to the IFJ Gender Leaflet.
http://www.ifj.org
