Aisya Aymanee M. Zaharin

Aisya Aymanee M. Zaharin serves as one of the board members of Australia GLBTQIA+ Multicultural Council (AGMC) while doing her PhD on navigating Asian values and media responsibility. Her research includes fields in political science and history, decolonisation to LGBTQI+ and Islam with a focus on improving social inequality, promoting cultural relativism and social responsibility concept. Being an intersectional feminist allows her to understand the depths of how people's social identities can create overlapping inequalities and discrimination. Aisya shares the voices of those experiencing intersecting discrimination and further integrates these with her lived experience and learnings through her academic-activist performance. Her recent collaborative publication with Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli on “Reclaiming Transgender Identity Through Intersectionality and Decoloniality” allows her to share her critical auto ethnography of herself that reflect intersectionality's commitment to reflexivity, structural critique, and understanding the complexity of LGBTQIA+ and her religion. She comes to this academic-activist realm from her lived experience of being a progressive Muslim, in addition to having faced enduring oppression due to transphobia throughout her early transition in Malaysia. Aisya was awarded as the Trans Activist/Advocate of the Year in 2021 by the Queensland Council for LGBTI Health.

Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

For over 30 years, Maria has been an academic, author, activist and ally in the intersections of cultural diversity, gender and sexual diversity, relationship and family diversity. Her current project is "Mobs and Wogs: First Peoples and Southern European migrants in Australia”.

An Honorary Fellow in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, founding member of the Australian LGBTIQ+ Multicultural Council in 2004, and founding member of Ascolta Italian Women in 2020, Maria won the Victorian Globe Straight Ally Award in 2018, and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Pallotta-Chiarolli

Susannah Cornwall is Professor of Constructive Theologies in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, UK. Her newest book, Constructive Theology and Gender Diversity: Transformative
Creatures, will be out with Cambridge University Press later this year.