Leonora Angeles is an associate professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia. She is concerned with gender and international development planning; women, gender, and globalization; good governance and gender planning in development bureaucracies; politics of women's movement in SEA

She has a B.A., M.A. (Philippines) Ph.D. (Queen's), Assistant Professor Leonora Angeles is a joint faculty member at the School of Community and Regional Planning and the Women's Studies Programme. She is also faculty research associate at the Centre for Human Settlements, the Centre for Research on Women's Studies and Gender Relations, and the Centre for Research on Southeast Asian Studies. Her continuing research interests are feminist perspectives on international development, gender and globalization, agrarian issues, human development and security linkages, states and elites in Southeast Asia. Her current research projects are globalization and feminization of export manufacturing (garments and semi-conductors industries) in SEA; gender, poverty reduction and bureaucracy in the Philippines and Vietnam; and gender analysis social capital and good governance in participatory development projects. She is currently involved in curriculum development and the integration of gender analysis and participatory methods for the five-year capacity-building project on Localised Poverty Reduction in Vietnam based at the Centre for Human Settlements.

Her co-edited book "Learning Civil Societies" deals with how localized communities embrace the progressive qualities of civil society is a critical topic in an era where diverse and divergent forces often counteract civil society formation and community initiatives. This collection explores the theoretical underpinnings of democratic planning and governance in relation to civil society formation and social learning.

The contributors to this volume use multiple lenses to uncover the challenges of democratizing planning and governance, helping to create a better understanding of how civil societies learn from their experiences, and how these lessons might be applied in other contexts. Learning Civil Societies provides insights for developing a critical methodology for studying civil societies and their formations and suggests that new organizational mechanisms within and outside civil societies must be created if more democratic forms of planning and governance are to emerge, be revitalized, and become institutionalized in the coming decades

BOOKS:
Learning Civil Societies: Shifting Contexts for Democratic Planning and Governance, Green College Thematic Lecture Series, Edited by Penny Gurstein and Leonora Angeles (University of Toronto Press, 2007)