Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist. She was born to a Jewish family in Poland and became a German citizen in 1897. In 1915 she co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League with Karl Liebknecht; it later became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She continuously resisted the war and impeding far-right and fascist ideologies. However, due to her strong opinions during the Spartacus Revolt she was abducted, along with Liebknecht, in Berlin by conservative paramilitary forces, known as the Freikorps who feared the left-wing revolution spreading wider. Both were tortured and executed by the Freikorps, but remain martyrs to socialists around the world.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo lived with polio which resulted in a limp. A later bus collision seriously injured Kahlo, causing chronic pain and infertility. Whilst in recovery she became interested in sketching, painting and photography. Throughout her life themes surrounding her body, injuries, infertility and relationships were prevalent in her paintings. Her tumultuous relationship with Diego Rivera featured heavily in her work, but she was arguably most famous for paintings depicting gender, class race and post-colonialism at the time.

Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. Her experiences as a Chinese American woman alerted her to the need for social change in the United States. Boggs became involved with grassroots organizations that advocated for tenants’ and workers’ rights, such as the South Side Tenants Organization and Socialist Workers Party. Boggs also frequently examined the role of Asian Americans in society, and wrote about how to work alongside unions and the Black Power movement to fight for the civil liberties of women and people of colour. In 1992 she and her husband founded Detroit Summer, a multicultural intergenerational youth program, which won numerous awards. This also led to their friends establishing the Boggs Center which continues to be a hub for community-based projects, grassroots organizing and social activism both locally and nationally.

Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, popular poet, and civil rights activist. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Angelou accomplished many things throughout her life and worked a string of different job, including fry cook, nightclub performer, actor, singer and playwright. She became deeply involved in the pan-Africanism, she moved to Egypt and then Ghana, acting as a correspondent for the decolonising of Africa. She was also active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was respected as a spokesperson for Black people and women and her works have been considered a defence of Black culture. Angelou chronicled her life in an autobiographical series of 7 books.

Kuya was a leading British communist and human rights activist from Liverpool. Initially training as a nurse Kuya retrained as a teacher and moved to London. After meeting like-minded teachers, she co-founded Teachers Against Racism and became involved with the academic journal Dragon’s Teeth, which investigated racism and sexism in children’s school books. As such she suggested alternatives and established the Racism Awareness Unit with support from Greater London Council. She was also and active member of the National Assembly of Women, pushing for anti-racism activism to be at the forefront of all campaigns, she was later elected as their general secretary. Kuya was also Liverpool’s first community relations officer and led a successful campaign to establish Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum. In 2021, a residence hall belonging to the University of Liverpool, which was formerly known as ‘Gladstone Hall,’ was renamed after Dorothy Kuya.

Audre Lorde was an African-American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor and civil rights activist. Lorde often described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She was a prominent member of the women’s and LGBTQ+ rights movements. Her writings called attention to the multifaceted nature of identity and the ways in which people from different walks of life could grow stronger together; her writings remain widely read and studied today. Lorde dedicated her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.

Junko Tabei was a Japanese mountaineer, author and teacher. Tabei was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest and the first woman to ascend the Seven Summits. She climbed the highest peak on every continent. In 1969, Junko Tabei established the Joshi-Tohan Club (Women’s Mountaineering Club) for women only. She wrote seven books, organized environmental projects to clean up rubbish left behind on Mount Everest and led annual climbs up Mount Fuji for youth effected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. In 2000 she completed her postgraduate studies at Kyushu University focusing on the environmental degradation of Mount Everest caused by the waste left behind by climbing groups. Additionally, Tabei was also the director of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, an organisation working at a global level to preserve mountain environments.

Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist and feminist critic. She is currently a professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak is considered one of the most influential post-colonial intellectuals, best known for her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and for translating Jacques Derrida’s ‘De la grammatologie.’ In 2012 Spivak was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being “a critical theorist and educator speaking for humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalised world.” Spivak has extensively written and spoken about “epistemological violence” and its crucial role in colonialism and colonial violence. In 2013 Spivak was awarded the Padma Bhushan which is the third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India.

Buchi Emecheta was a Nigerian novelist who moved to the UK in 1962. Emecheta wrote plays, an autobiography and children’s literature; she was the author of more than 20 books. Emecheta’s themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education, gained recognition from critics and honours. She once described her stories as “stories of the world, where women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.” Her writings have been hugely influential within post-colonial literature and post-colonial studies, where she has explored the tension between tradition and modernity and the influence of colonialism, whiteness and western ideologies on Nigerian communities and the African continent. Emecheta has been deemed “the first successful Black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948.”

Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar and author. Influenced by her segregated upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, Davis joined the Black Panthers an all-Black branch of the Communist Party as a young woman. As early as 1969, Davis began public speaking engagements. She expressed her opposition to the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, the prison-industrial complex, and her support for gay rights and other social justice movements. During the 1970s she visited many Eastern-Bloc countries and in the 1980s she was the Communist Party’s candidate for Vice President twice. During this time Davis was the professor of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, much of her work focusing on the abolition of prisons. She was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organisation dedicated to building the movement to abolish prisons. Davis speaks on the disproportionate number of incarcerated African-Americans, deeming it a modern form of slavery. Following the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 she again spoke out about the modern-day slavery and embedded racism in societal structures that left people in North Carolina in horrendous conditions.

Diane Abbott is a British politician. She has been a Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. Abbott is a socialist member of the Labour Party and is the first Black woman to be elected to Parliament; she is also the longest serving Black MP in the House of Commons. Abbott chairs the All-Party Parliamentary British-Caribbean Group and the All-Party Sickle Cell and Thalassemia Group. Abbott has often voted against certain party policies, including voting against the Iraq War, opposing ID cards and campaigning against the renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons. She is also the founder of the London Schools and the Black Child (LSBC) initiative which aims to raise educational achievement levels amongst Black children.

Laverne Cox is an American actress and LGBTQ+ advocate. She rose to prominence with her role as Sophia Burset on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Subsequently she became the first transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in an acting category. Cox was one of fifteen women to be chosen by guest editor Meghan (Duchess of Sussex) to appear on the cover of the September 2019 issues of British Vogue. Cox was thus the first transgender person to appear on the cover of British Vogue. She has been noted by her LGBTQ+ peers and many other for being a trailblaze for the transgender community and has won numerous awards for her activist approach in spreading awareness.

Tarana Burke is an American activist, she started the MeToo movement. After working with survivors of sexual violence Burke developed the not for profit ‘Just Be’ in 2003, which was an all-girls program for Black girls aged 12-18. In 2006 Burke began using the MeToo movement to help women with similar experiences to stand up for themselves. Over a decade later, in 2017, #MeToo became a viral hashtag when actress Alyssa Milano and other women began using it to tweet about the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases. Time named Burke, among a group of other prominent activists, “The Silence Breakers,” as the Time Person of the Year in 2017. Burke presents at public speaking events across America and is currently Senior Director at Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn. There she organises workshops to help improve policies at schools, workplaces and places of worship, to focus on helping victims to not blame themselves for sexual violence.

Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works include novels, short stories and nonfiction. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother the first female registrar. At age 19 she left for the US to continue education. She has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from John Hopkins University and another master’s degree in African History from Yale University. Adichie has also received honorary doctorate degrees from 14 Universities. Her works have been translated into over thirty languages. Her first novel Purple Hibiscus (2003) won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize; her second novel won the Orange Prize. In 2013, her novel Americanah won the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of The New York Times Top Ten. Adichie focuses on her experiences of being an African feminist, her views on gender construction and sexuality. She also explores race and how it is perceived in Nigeria and the US. Adichie has also delivered 2 landmark TED talks. Her 2012 Tedx Euston talk entitled “We should all be feminists,” has been viewed more than 5 million times sparking a worldwide conversation about feminism – it was later published in 2014.

Christine Sun Kim is an American sound artist based in Berlin. Her first language is American Sign Language. Working predominantly in drawing, performance, and video, Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society. Musical notation, written language, ASL and the use of body are all recurring elements in her work. Her work has been exhibited in major cultural institutions internationally, including in the Museum of Modern Art's first exhibition about sound in 2013 and the Whitney Biennial in 2019. She was named a TED Fellow in both 2013 and 2015, a Director’s Fellow at MIT Media Lab in 2015, and a Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellow in 2020.

Ellie Simmonds is British former Paralympian swimmer who competed in S6 events. She was born with Achondroplasia and became interested in swimming at age 5. She came to national attention when she competed in the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing – she won 2 gold medals for Great Britain as the youngest member of the team (aged 13). In 2012 she was re-selected for the Great Britain squad. She won another two gold medals and set a world record in the 400m freestyle. She won another gold medal in 2016 and set another world record this time in the 200m medley. Simmonds has won 10 gold World Championship titles.

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at age 17 making her the youngest person ever to receive it, as well as the second Pakistani and first Pashtun person to do so. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the Pakistani Taliban have at times banned girls from attending school. Malala’s advocacy has become an international movement, former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said she has become Pakistan’s “most prominent citizen.” On 9 October 2012, a Taliban gunman shot Yousafzai as she rode home on a bus after taking an exam in Pakistan's Swat Valley. Protests broke out in several Pakistani cities condemning the shooting the day after the attack, and over 2 million people signed the Right to Education campaign's petition. Malala founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organisation that advocates for girls’ and women’s rights to education, with Shiza Shahid. In 2013 she co-authored I Am Malala and international best-seller.

Thunberg is a Swedish environmental activist who is known for challenging world leaders to take immediate action for climate change mitigation. Her activism began when she persuaded her parents to adopt lifestyle choices that reduced her own carbon footprint. In August 2018 (at age 15) she would spend her Fridays outside the Swedish Parliament to call for stronger action on climate change; she held a sign that read Skolstrejk för kilmatet (School strike for climate). Soon other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities and led school strikes entitled Fridays for Future. Thunberg initially gained notice for her youth and her straightforward and blunt speaking manner, both in public and to political leaders and assemblies.