UNESCO

Kirsten Kristensen

David Stephens is Professor of International Education at the University of Brighton. He has researched and taught in the global South for the past forty years, notably in West and East Africa, South East Asia, and recently, for the past six years, in Peru.

He is the author of many books on the quality of basic education and research methods including recently, International Education: Culture, Context and Narrative (Routledge). He is also a successful novelist. His next novel, The Disappeared (Thinkwell Books) will be published in the New Year.

Ginny Morrow is Visiting Professor at UCL Social Research Institute, University College London, UK and  Research Associate, Young Lives, Department of International Development, University of Oxford. She was Deputy Director of Young Lives (a study of childhood poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, see www.younglives.org.uk)  from 2011 to 2017.

Previously she held academic positions at the University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, Brunel University and the University of London Institute of Education, where she was programme leader of the MA Sociology of Childhood and Children’s Rights, from 2004 to 2010.

Her research focuses on children’s work, violence affecting children, sociological approaches to the study of childhood and children’s rights, the ethics of social research with children, children’s understandings of family, and children and ‘social capital’. She has published extensively, and has been a member of numerous Advisory Groups and Research Ethics Committees. She also acts as Ethics Advisor on research projects. She was a co-editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research from 2006 to 2016.

An advocate for the freedom to create and experience art as a right for all, Inés has worked internationally across the academic, cultural and creative sectors since 2008 as a producer, project manager, researcher, musician and creative practitioner. From 2017-2022 Inés was Project Manager of Changing the Story at University of Leeds, a £4 million AHRC GCRF project that looked at how arts and heritage could support youth-centred approaches to civil society building in conflict-affected communities. https://changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk She is co-editor, with Prof. Paul Cooke, of Participatory Arts in International Development (Routledge, 2020), Vice Chair of South Asian Arts UK and Advisory Board Member of Mobile Arts for Peace. In 2022 she joined University of Leeds’ Horizons Institute – a shared platform for tackling global challenges through collaborative and interdisciplinary working – as a Research Manager for Creativity, Partnerships & Impact.

Tim Prentki is Emeritus Professor of Theatre for Development at the University of Winchester where, for many years, he created and ran the MA in Theatre and Media as Development. This programme trained students to become facilitators of theatre and video processes designed to assist communities in addressing issues in relation to their self-development. Students ran projects throughout the world. Prentki has been involved in projects, NGO training and academic collaborations in Asia, Africa and South America.

He is the author of The Fool in European Theatre and Applied Theatre Development; co-author of Political Theatre and Performance & Civic Engagement and co-editor of The Applied Theatre Reader and The Companion to Applied Performance. He has served on the editorial and advisory boards of Research in Drama Education and Applied Theatre Research.

A past winner of a Southern Arts award, he has written and directed for theatre for fifty years, including Shakespeare, contempoary writing and his own scripts, one of which, Half Measures, was recently presented at the Shakespeare North Playhouse.

Vyonne Akoth is the founder and director of Impart Change, a local non-profit organization that empowers children and youth to be sustainable peace champions in their local communities. She is a 2019 Sakharov Fellow with the European Parliament and a 2019 Emerging Leader with the Obama Foundation Leaders: Africa Program.