Zaina Gadema

Zaina is our UK research lead and holds a lifelong commitment to justice-based sustainability research and practice. Her departmental leadership role in EDI (equality diversity and inclusion) and postgraduate teaching on sustainable global supply chains sparked her interest in exploring menopause as a critical justice-based element of ageing and women’s health.  Initial work was undertaken with a gender diverse group of international postgraduate students to examine demand and supply chain access to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in a global context during COVID-19. The exercise evidenced a dearth of scholarly research on praxes of ‘menopausing’ and less so on racialised, marginalised women in transition. Zaina is dedicated to exploring a range of diverse spaces and places in which ‘menopausing’ and community-based activism collide and thrive as areas in which cultural knowledge, sense-making and communication is safe, diverse, caring and inclusive.  

Zaina explores the heterogenic forms in which ‘transition’ phases of ageing women are embodied, lived and experienced, both individually and collectively.  She uses transnational feminist theory as a lens to stimulate cross-disciplinary research collaboration.  Her passion for centring racialised, often marginalised voices from diverse backgrounds seeks to cultivate cultures of liberative inclusion and diversity as an overarching imperative to decolonise ‘menopausing’ spaces away from the typically conventionally stigmatised, stereo-typed and exclusionary forms of knowledge production and communication.