2. Women’s rights: a challenge for the conceptual framework of human rights

Paola Melchiori’s background is in philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis. In the seventies she left the University to work as a teacher and a director of the Union’ s Formation Center for Adult Education. She is the co/founder and past president of The Women’s Free University in Milan (1986), of the Research and Intercultural Education Association Crinali (1996-2001), of the International Feminist University Network, (2001-2009), all “free universities”, international think-thank for women’s critical thinking and education. Their goal was to create free spaces of critical thinking, teaching and learning in order to develop and make visible new paradigms of knowledge based on women’s ways of knowing and learning, working in an interdisciplinary way across cultures, classes and specializations. In the eighties/nineties she has worked in International Development, mainly in Africa and Latin America, in women’s education projects, forming an international network of academics, artists, social activists, aiming at creating a meaningful holistic knowledge, interdisciplinary and action oriented. She is author of three books, and has written on feminist theory and on the topics of knowledge creation. Feminist theorist and writer, author of books/videos/articles on feminist issues,,, has created nationally and internationally, free spaces of critical thinking, based on the model of the Free Universities. Their main idea is to develop and make visible new paradigms of knowledge based on women’s ways of knowing, working in an interdisciplinary way across cultures, classes and specializations.