Salons

Paola Melchiori

Paola Melchiori is a Feminist theorist , activist and writer, author of books/videos/articles on feminist issues. She 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 thinking and knowing, working in an interdisciplinary way across cultures, classes and specializations. She is the founder and past president of The Women’s Free University in Milan, of Crinali, a research and intercultural education association in Milan, of the International Feminist University Network, an international think-tank for women’s critical thinking and education. From the mid eighties she has worked in different African and Latin American countries in women’s education, participatory research and popular education with a Freirian and feminist perspective. During the years of the UN Conferences of the 90ties she has formed a solid International network of feminists working together on these issues. Her main interest is the intercultural collaboration among feminists of different cultures and disciplines. She is the author of several essays on feminist theory, of four books, and of several videos.

Judith Maeeryam Wouk

Judith Wouk has been part of the Maternal Gift Economy Movement since it started. She is an ordained Kohenet Hebrew Priestess, chair of the Funeral Advisory and Memorial Society of Ontario (FAMS) and a member of Conservation Burial Ottawa. She lives in Ottawa, Canada. Her article “Women, Chevra Kadisha, and the Gift Economy” appears in Canadian Woman Studies/ les cahiers de la femme Volume 34 Numbers 1,2 fall/winter 2020, Feminist Gift Economy: Maternalist Alternative to Patriarchy and Capitalism.