Professor Syed Farid Alatas is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He headed the Department of Malay Studies at NUS from 2007 till 2013. He lectured at the University of Malaya in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies prior to joining NUS. Professor Alatas has authored numerous books and articles, including Ibn Khaldun (Oxford University Press, 2013); Applying Ibn Khaldun: The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology (Routledge, 2014), and (with Vineeta Sinha) Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon (Palgrave, 2017).

He has a forthcoming book entitled Decolonial Thought from the Malay World. His areas of interest are the sociology of Islam, social theory, religion and reform, intra- and inter-religious dialogue, the critique of Eurocentrism, and the promotion of autonomous knowledge.

Professor Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Equality Studies (Emerita) at University College Dublin (UCD) and a serving member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC). Over three decades, she played a pioneering role in establishing and directing both the Equality Studies Centre  (1990) and the School of Social Justice (2004) in UCD. Both her research and teaching were built on collaborations with social justice activists, inside and outside the University.

A visiting scholar in many of the world’s leading universities, she has authored a several books and academic articles on all types of equality and social justice issues, especially on education, and, more recently, on care and social justice. Her most recent books include New Managerialism in Education: Commercialisation, Carelessness and Gender(2015) (with Bernie Grummell and Dympna Devine) and  Care and Capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice, Polity Press, Cambridge in 2022. Her forthcoming book, A Critique of Human Capital in Education will be published in 2025 by Routledge. 

She was awarded the UCD Medal for Pioneering Change, in 2018, and the Irish Research Council, President of Ireland Prize for her research promoting Equality and Social Justice, in 2019.

Outside of academia, Kathleen has been active as a public intellectual. She has served as an Adviser on Education and the Social Sciences to the European Commission (DGEAC), as an Appeals Commissioner in the Department of Education, and as a Board member on many public and voluntary bodies. She is currently a member of the steering committee for the international initiative Human Education in the 3rd Millennium which published a new declaration for education, Educating Humanity for the Third Millennium: A Global Declaration 2024 https://humaneducation.net/declaration

Dr Bernie Grummell is currently an Associate Professor with the Departments of Education and Adult & Community Education in Maynooth University. She is a co-director of the Centre for Research in Adult Learning and Education (CRALE) in the Department for Adult & Community Education.  Her research explores the landscape, processes and experiences of equality and transformation across different sectors of education and society, with a particular focus on transformative community development, inclusion in and through education, and adult learning.  She has worked on international research and teaching collaborations with universities and communities in Malawi, Zambia, Palestine and a range of European partners, as well as in local and national policy and community engagements

See: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/adult-and-community-education/our-people/bernie-grummell

Professor Jan McArthur is Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK.  Her research focuses on the nature and purposes of higher education, and how these relate to teaching, learning and assessment, as seen from the perspective of education and social justice, informed by critical theory.

Professor Alice Sullivan is Professor of Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute. Professor Sullivan’s research focusses on social and educational inequalities in the life course. She has made extensive use of secondary data analysis of large-scale longitudinal data sets in her research, with a particular focus on the British birth cohort studies of 1958, 1970 and 2000. She has published on areas including: social class and sex differences in educational attainment, single-sex and co-educational schooling, private and grammar schools, cultural capital, reading for pleasure, social mobility, and health inequalities. She has also written about conflicts between scholarly and scientific values and gender identity politics.