Core Beliefs
The earth is a miracle that sustains all life. It is our only home. People are connected through the air we breathe, the water we share, and the oceans that lap and crash onto our beaches. We’re nourished by sunlight and dancing, by colors and moonrise, by the food we eat, the gardens we plant, and the love we experience.
We’re connected to the past through our elders and ancestors, some known and many unknown. We’re linked day-to-day with neighbors, family and friends, to many people we never meet, and to the world of ideas and imagination in books, music, and art that stretches across borders and generations. We exchange life-giving oxygen with trees and plants. Our fates are intertwined. We can offer each other a better world.
I want my work to contribute to nurturing and re-making the connections that are torn apart by our destructive economy, bankrupt political systems, deadening mass media, war and conflict. To maintain themselves these institutions reproduce the prejudices and domination of racism, colonialism and ethnocentrism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia every day.
Yet, ordinary people have a wealth of creativity, hope, vision, skills, life experience, and the conviction that things can and must be organized differently, based on justice and love. I want to stand with the many thousands who are actively bringing this world into being or safeguarding those parts that already exist.
Biography - The Short Version
Gwyn Kirk is a scholar-activist concerned with genuine security and a sustainable world. She has taught women’s and gender studies at US universities and colleges for 30 years. She publishes a textbook/anthology, Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives, co-edited with Margo Okazawa-Rey, and has written widely on ecofeminism, militarism, and women’s peace organizing. She holds a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics.
Gwyn Kirk is a founding member of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism, and Women for Genuine Security, the US-based group in that Network. She co-directed the 2012 documentary, Living Along the Fenceline, featuring grassroots women leaders from South Korea to Puerto Rico whose communities are affected by the U.S. military presence in their backyards. She has written scripts and designed outfits for Fashioning Resistance to Militarism, a popular education project.
Biography - The Longer Version
Gwyn Kirk is a scholar-activist concerned with genuine security and a sustainable world. She has taught courses in women’s and gender studies, environmental studies, political science, and sociology at a range of US universities and colleges.
Gwyn Kirk publishes Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives, co-edited with Margo Okazawa-Rey, and substantially revised for a 7th edition to be published in 2019. She co-authored Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions from the Women’s Peace Movement with Alice Cook (South End Press, 1983), also translated into French and Japanese.
Her articles on feminism, ecology, militarism, and transnational feminist organizing have appeared in a range of anthologies and journals. She writes for popular audiences through activist publications and projects. As an editor, she has contributed to materials published by non-profit organizations in the United States, South Korea, and Palestine.
Gwyn Kirk received a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa (2002); was a Visiting Scholar in the Women’s Leadership Institute, Mills College (2002-2003); and held the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College (1999-2001) with Margo Okazawa-Rey.
She co-directed the 2012 documentary, Living Along the Fenceline, with Lina Hoshino and Deborah Lee, which features seven grassroots women from South Korea to Puerto Rico whose communities are affected by the US military presence in their backyards. She was part of creating a fashion show, Fashioning Resistance to Militarism, and has written scripts and designed outfits for this popular education project.
Gwyn Kirk is a founding member of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism, a collaboration of scholars and activists who oppose militarism and promote everyday security for sustainable communities; and a member of Women for Genuine Security, the US-based group in that Network. She has been a member of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, and served on the Steering Committee of Women Cross DMZ (2015-2019), the Board of Agape Foundation (2007-2010), and the Board of WAND Education Fund (2000-2006).
Gwyn Kirk holds a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics, and a master’s degree in Town Planning from Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University) in Great Britain. Her doctoral work focused on the politics of city planning, published as Urban Planning in a Capitalist Society in 1980 and reissued by Routledge Library Editions in 2018.