Maternal Gift Economy: Breaking Through -
Ongoing Salons
Every two weeks
Dra. Lila Sharif is a feminist Palestinian creative writer, researcher, and educator based in the Phoenix area. Her research focuses on Indigenous ontologies, race/ethnicity, Arab and Muslim experiences in the United States, food studies, and global, decolonial feminisms. She is a co-founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective as well as the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. She has published poetry, books, academic articles, and public essays. She is currently co-editing A Decolonial Guidebook of Historic Palestine forthcoming with Duke, and is completing a book on the decolonial politics embedded in Palestine's ancestral olive traditions forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. Sharif holds a Dual Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies and Sociology.
Pilar Emitxin is a feminist graphic activist from Córdoba, Argentina. Citizen of the universe. Illustrator and graphic designer. She works with social organizations, assemblies, feminist and independent media outlets throughout Abya Yala (Latin American original native peoples) and the Global South, focusing mainly on feminist, anti-extractivist, childhood defense and international solidarity graphics. She is currently – as of 2023 – one of the administrators of the international solidarity feminist network with Palestine, the “Global South Feminist Assembly for Palestine”, comprised of over 600 woldwide solidarity initiatives, collectives and organizations.
Jodie Evans is a life-long peace and social justice activist and co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She was in Jerry Brown’s cabinet when he served as Governor of California in the 1970's, ran his Senate campaign in 1982, and his revolutionary 1992 campaign for President. She has led citizen diplomacy delegations to Iran, the Gaza Strip, Yemen and Afghanistan and has published two books Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Terrorism and Twilight of Empire. She founded a campaign at CODEPINK: Cultivating a Local Peace economy to address the need to change culture from a war economy culture to a peace economy culture if we want to achieve peace and justice. To a giving, sharing, caring, thriving relational economy from an extractive, destructive and oppressive economy. https://www.codepink.org/
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.
Peggy Antrobus I identify as a Caribbean feminist activist. Since the mid-1970s I have been involved in programs to advance women’s rights, first within the structure of government, later within the academy and now as part of a feminist-led global women’s movement. My most significant and life-changing experience has been being part of the network of feminist researcher-activists from the Economic South advancing development alternatives with women for a new era (DAWN). My interest in the Gift Economy came from realization of the fact that much of what allows Caribbean people (and economies) to survive and thrive takes place outside the Market, grounded in social relations of reciprocity and solidarity. Today, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in which gifting, and women’s caring labor, much of it unwaged or low-waged, is the basis of survival for communities, even whole countries, I am interested in how the value of these practices might finally be recognized/acknowledged and reinforced though policies that support rather than continue to exploit this essential work.
Rosalind (Ros) Petchesky is Distinguished Professor Emerita (retired) of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is a widely published feminist scholar and recipient of a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellowship. Her first book, Abortion and Women’s Choice: The state, sexuality and reproductive freedom (1984, 1990) was cited by the United States Supreme Court in its landmark decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and received an award from the American Historical Association. It was issued by Verso in a new edition in March 2024 as part of their Feminist Classics series. Her many subsequent articles and books in the field of reproductive and sexual rights and justice have been translated and circulated in countries across the globe. A lifelong anti-Zionist/anti-racist feminist, in 2013 Professor Petchesky became an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace and part of the New York City chapter’s leadership team. With JVP colleagues Esther Farmer and Sarah Sills, she co-edited/authored A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (Monthly Review, 2021). Her participation as a Jewish elder in protests in New York City and Washington, DC against the Israeli and US enabled genocide on Gaza resulted in three arrests and numerous online interviews that have appeared internationally.
Maria Suarez 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. https://escribana.org/
Genevieve Vaughan 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.