Authors and Contributors

Eva-Maria Svensson

Professor, Department of Law, University of Gothenburg.

She was the Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Research at the University of Gothenburg between 2012 and 2017, and since July 2018 she has been Deputy Head of the Department of Law. Her research interests are feminist legal studies, legal philosophy and theory, freedom of expression, and aging. She teaches equality and antidiscrimination law as well as legal theory. She is one of the editors of several collections gathering feminist legal scholars in the Nordic countries, and one of the authors of a textbook on gender legal studies (2009/2018).

During 2005–2015 she was Professor at the Faculty of Law at the Arctic University of Norway. During that period, together with colleagues she established the interdisciplinary Research Network on Gender Equality in the Arctic (TUARQ). She was also part of the Nordic Research Network for Sámi and Indigenous Peoples' Law (NORSIL). Several workshops have been organised within the networks, leading to presentations at conferences and several publications in journals (Arctic Yearbook, Nordic Journal on Law and Society (NJOLAS), and Yearbook of Polar Law) and books published by Ashgate, Palgrave Macmillan, and Springer).

“The inspiration to do research on gender equality has been lifelong and has not come with any specific event. With a non-academic background, being a woman, yet with a strong expectation of justice, I perceived structures of unequally distributed power and injustices hidden by the formal principle of equality before the law. The principle expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was far from fulfilled. I became a researcher to be able to critically study power structures laid down in the law.

The knowledge field feminist/gender legal theory offered a platform at which I could rethink basic assumptions in law and legal scholarship. The presumption of the human being as autonomous, abstract and without characteristics such as for example sex/gender and indigeneity, is one explanation why the law persistently can have unequal impact. To study law as a social order based on certain power structures, unveils unequal power structures prevalent in societies around the world. The power structures are present on several levels, the individual, the societal and the conceptual, and they impact on how we think about things, which opportunities we have and how we choose to live our lives.

The world has changed, and how we think of gender as embracing more than the binary distinction between men and women and as intersecting with other power structures has changed, but what remain is the fact that still we have a long way to go to reach equality.”

Olga Stefansdottir

Olga Stefansdóttir is an indepedendant legal and business consultant, certified russian lawyer, american legal professional with business acumen. First-class law degree in International Trade law from The Moscow State Institute of International Relations of the Russian Federation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MGIMO), Berkeley LL.M, MBA University of Reykjavik.

Anna Maria Hubert

Tanja Joona

Tanja Joona (Dr.Soc.Sci.) Title of Docent in Public International law, is working as a Senior researcher at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland (2000 - ) At the moment she is the Finnish Institutional leader of the H2020 project JustNorth (2020-2023): Toward Just, Ethical and Sustainable Arctic Economies, Environments and Societies. The Consortium consists of 15 partners all over the world and has a budget of 6 million euros.

Joona’s main research interests focus on mainly to the Arctic region, with comparative legal and political aspects of indigenous Sámi society and especially issues dealing with traditional livelihoods, international human rights law and identity questions in the context of justice and equality. Her PhD (2012) dealt with the implementation of ILO Convention No. 169 concerning the rights of indigenous peoples and land use questions in the Nordic countries. She has been working with several national and international projects eg. on Sámi children and youth in urban cities funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NUORGÁV). At the moment, besides the H2020 she is working as a researcher in a project dealing with Arctic industrial cities and youth wellbeing (WOLLIE) funded by the Finnish Academy. Tanja Joona has published numerous amount of scientific peer reviewed articles and has participated international conferences around the world. She has also several positions of trust at the University of Lapland as well as in the society.

Siff Lund Kjærgaard

Siff Lund Kjærgaard has a bachelor in Sociology and Cultural Analysis, including a semester at University of Melbourne and an interdisciplinary master in human rights from University of Oslo and the Norwegian Centre of Human Rights. She wrote her thesis on Greenlandic Indigenous women’s rights to access to justice in cases of gender-based violence.

Siff Lund Kjærgaard has previously worked for NGO’s in Denmark and the UK, as a student assistant for the Justice Department in Greenland, and later for the Greenlandic Constitutional Committee as a specialised secretary in human rights. She currently works as a coordinating assistant for the project JUST SOCIETY at University of Southern Denmark.

Jennifer Koshan

Jennifer Koshan is a Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Calgary. Before joining the Faculty she worked as a Crown prosecutor in the Northwest Territories and as legal director at West Coast LEAF, a women’s equality rights organization. Currently, her research and teaching focus on equality, human rights and legal responses to interpersonal violence. She is a founding member of the Women’s Court of Canada, a feminist judgment-writing project that has inspired similar projects around the world. She is also Principal Investigator on a cross-Canada research project on domestic violence and access to justice funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Law Foundation of Ontario’s Access to Justice Fund. This project has resulted in several publications, most recently an eBook on domestic violence laws across Canada, which is available on Can LII. She is also Chair of the Law Faculty’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

Bergljót Þrastardóttir

Bergljót Þrastardóttir is an Assistant Professor at the University of Akureyri and worked previously as the head of the Educational Division at the Directorate of Equality in iceland, an institution under the Prime Ministers’ Office (2008-2020). Her main teaching has been on gender studies, gender, human rights, inclusion and democracy in education and gender based violence. Her research field is related to gender and empowerment, gender and education, inclusion and power and resistance in the classroom and critical pedagogy.