Salon #9 - March 27, 2021
Frieda Werden and María Suárez Toro
Frieda Werden
Presentation title: Media, abundance, and belonging: The role of gift community media in the communications ecosystem
How community media differs from commercial and public media, how women use it, and why it is worth preserving in a podcast society. Most examples will be drawn from radio.
Frieda Werden is co-founder and series producer of WINGS: Women’s International News Gathering Service, which provides women’s voices and issues coverage to noncommercial radio. The project started with the contact list from a radio women’s meeting called by Genevieve Vaughan at the 3rd World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985. The pilot was funded and distributed by US National Public Radio, but WINGS found a more receptive audience through the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC). Werden’s paper on community radio appears in the anthology Women and the Gift Economy.
More @ wingsradio.org
María Suárez Toro
Presentation title: The creation of a matriarchal archetype for telling women's stories
As a modern day social media version of shortwave and internet radio Feminist international Radio Endeavor (Fire), Escribana today features women’s voices about present day challenges that affirm women’s tenacity to share their voices about alternative ways of being in the planet. Quite a gift.
From alternatives ways of raising sustainable economies in Covid emergency (Mano Vuelta in Costa Rica this past year) to media work about the “Transnationals of Faith” in Latin America and Tona Ina as an archetipal Character to tell the unfold stories, Escrivana today is the extension of the gift of voice and choice in today’ s world.
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.