Maternal Gift Economy: Breaking Through -
Ongoing Salons
Every two weeks
Salon #63 - Femininst Radio: The Gift of Women's Voices
Featuring Maria Suarez and Frieda Werden. With Genevieve Vaughan.
Moderated by Letecia Layson.
May 4, 2024
María Suárez Toro
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.
Frieda Werden
Frieda Werden has been practicing feminist media since the 1970s, both as a volunteer and a professional in radio and print. A few times, her feminism got her in trouble on the professional side. Since the 1980s, she has been active in the international community radio movement; and, since the 1990s, in the International Association of Women in Radio and Television. She promotes and volunteers for local community media - including 9 years with a diverse group of women producing a weekly program for cable access television. She had the immense fortune in the 1990s to be part of Genevieve Vaughan's Foundation for a Compassionate Society, which brought together a vast range of feminist speakers and media women from around the world to discuss and work on strategies for facing urgent issues of the day. Originally from the US, Frieda relocated to Canada in 2002. The community radio series she co-founded in 1986, WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service, a half-hour weekly program delivered free to community radio stations around the world, has been in distribution for 38 years.