Gale Summerfield

Gale Summerfield
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL USA

Gale Summerfield is Director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program and Associate Professor of Human and Community Development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research addresses gender, human security, and globalization. She has written on the gender aspects of reforms in China and other developing countries; risk and international economic crises; transnational care work; and cross-border sourcing. A current project focuses on human security issues of production and use of biofuels, especially food security in developing countries. Gale was guest editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society on "Risks and Rights in the 21st Century." This issue explored policies to reduce the long-run losses from financial and economic crises, informalization of employment, and democratization in politics. Her co-edited books include Women in the Age of Economic Transformation; Women's Rights to House and Land: China, Laos, Vietnam; and Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice. She has worked with IAFFE since the NGO forum of the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, when she helped organize and participated in an IAFFE panel on economic restructuring. She recently co-edited a double special issue of Feminist Economics on gender, China and the WTO and is working on a project on gender equity in employment in information technology in China, India, and the US.

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