Maternal Gift Economy: Breaking Through -
Ongoing Salons

Every two weeks


Salon #37 - The Gift of Communication

Featuring María Suárez, Selene Aswell and Genevieve Vaughan

Moderated by Letecia Layson.

Oct. 15, 2022

María Suárez Toro

Presentation title: Coming Soon

María Suárez Toro is a feminist journalist, an activist in defense of human rights, and an educator. She was born in Puerto Rico and has been a resident of San José, Costa Rica for close to 50 years.[1] She was a co-director of the Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE) from 1991 to 2011, of which she is a co-founder. She worked as an educator in literacy in many countries in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. Since 1998 she has been an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Denver. Since 2011 she has been a correspondent for Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica for the News Service for the Women of Latin America and the Caribbean (Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer de Latinoamérica y el Caribe), and since 2015 has been a coordinator of the Community Center Diving Ambassadors of the South Caribbean Sea (Centro comunitario de buceo Embajadores y Embajadoras del Mar del Caribe Sur), which is dedicated to archeological diving and recovery of the history of the afro-descendant population on the coast of Costa Rica.



Selene Aswell

Selene Aswell is a Certified Nonviolent Communication Trainer, gift economy coach, and community living consultant. Her goal is to contribute to the co-creation of a needs-based, regenerative culture. Her work is focused on needs-consciousness raising and integrating nonviolence into human relationships. Selene has a BA in Community Studies. She is an active community member of the Nonviolent Global Liberation Online Community.



Genevieve Vaughan

Genevieve Vaughan (b.1939) is an independent researcher who lives part time in Italy and part in Texas. She created the multicultural all-woman activist Foundation for a Compassionate Society (1987-2005) and the Temple of Sekhmet in the Nevada desert (1992 – ongoing) and she co-created the network: International Feminists for a Gift Economy (2001 – ongoing). Her books are For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997), Homo Donans (2006) and The Gift in the Heart of Language: the Maternal Source of Meaning (2015). She has edited Il Dono/The Gift (2004), Women and the Gift Economy (2007) and The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy (2019). A volume of the Canadian Women’s Studies Journal dedicated to the maternal gift economy has just appeared (2020).

More information @ www.gift-economy.com.



Previous Salons