October 1, 2019
Alka Arora
Associate Professor
Women's Spirituality
School of Consciousness and Transformation
Current Research
Prof. Alka Arora has been engaged in research and public scholarship in the areas of spiritual activism, leadership, and gender reconciliation. In May 2019, Prof. Arora traveled to New York to co-facilitate a workshop, “MeToo to WeToo: Reconciling Relations Between Women and Men,” as part of her ongoing work with Gender Equity an Reconciliation International (GERI). This event was developed in collaboration with the UN Committee on Spirituality, Global Values, and Concerns (CSVGC) and brought together 28 leaders from 6 countries to engage in transformative dialogue about gender justice and cultural change.
In August, Prof. Arora presented “On Feminism’s Fourth Wave,” a CIIS Big Ideas talk that is available to listen to on the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. She recently co-authored “Socially Conscious Leadership: An Integrated Model,” which will be published in the next edition of the Journal of Leadership Studies.
Prof. Arora will be speaking at the Climate and Sex Symposium in Oakland at the end of October and at the National Women’s Studies Association in November.
Past Research
Dr. Arora’s scholarship is focused on three interrelated areas of inquiry: feminist spiritual activism, vegan ecofeminism, and transformative pedagogy and leadership. She uses what she calls an integral feminist pedagogy in her teaching, inviting students to see social justice work as a form of sacred praxis. She also advocates for nonhuman animal lives in her teaching and research, and has been a committed vegan since 2013. Her courses at CIIS include “Spiritual Activism,” “Animal Ethics,” “Conscious Leadership Among Women,” and “Teaching to Transform: Liberatory Feminist Pedagogies.”
