Alka Arora
Associate Professor
Women's Spirituality
School of Consciousness and Transformation (SCT)
PhD, University of Washington
BA, University of Southern California
Alka Arora, PhD has a doctorate in Women Studies from the University of Washington and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Southern California. She has been teaching in the Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS since 2011. She also served as the department chair from 2012-2016, during which time she developed the MA program in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice.
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.”
Dr. Arora bridges academia and community engagement through her collaboration with Gender Equity and Reconciliation International (GERI), a non-profit organization that draws on the power of truth-telling and dialogue to transform gender relations. She facilitates public workshops with GERI and, in 2018, helped develop its first gender healing workshop specifically for people of color.
“Time’s Up on Meat Eating: A Vegan Ecofeminist Manifesto” (Video)
Feminism and Liberation Psychology (Video)
“Re-enchanting Feminism: Challenging Religious and Secular Patriarchies” (Google Books excerpt)
Women’s Spirituality at CIIS: Uniting Integral and Feminist Pedagogies (article)
Gender Equity and Reconciliation: People of Color Workshop
On Feminism’s Fourth Wave: A Big Ideas Talk with Alka Arora
