Alison Woodward

Alison E. Woodward (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is Research Professor at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and co-director of RHEA, the Center for Gender Studies and Diversity Research. Since 2007 she is a Senior Associate of the Institute for European Studies. Her research interests are in the field of comparative European Union public policy and organization, especially in the areas of civil society transnational mobilization, gender, migration, and equality.

As professor or senior researcher she has been affiliated with the Universities of Uppsala, Antwerp and Brussels, Ruhr University, Wayne State University, Rutgers University, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Working as a policy consultant she has assisted the European Commission, the Council of Europe, the United Nations and the Flemish government, and is frequently relied upon for expert contributions relating to social exclusion, gender and politics. An active member of the European Consortium for Political Research section on European Union Politics, she has convened the stream on Diversity, Gender and European Integration at the bi-annual conferences in Bologna, Istanbul and Riga.

She is the Belgian coordinator for the Research Network Gender and the State funded by the European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Belgian representative in the COST A-34 network on European Gender and Well-Being, and in the ATHENA EU Training and Education 3B network on gender and public policies. She was a scientific coordinator of the COST Action Conference European Social Movements and Well-Being at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam in March 2009