News & Articles – Page 8

Scholar Salons: Registration and Recordings

Starhawk

Tova Beck-Friedman Portrait

Letecia Layson

Genevieve Vaughan

Jeannette Kiel PhD

Emily Packer

Normandi Ellis

Sarah Chandler

Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen

Lauren Raine

Cristina Biaggi

Starr Goode

Mandisa Wood

Annie Finch, photo by Kate Warren

Anne Key and Verónica Iglesias

Jane Caputi

Judy Grahn

Kathy Jones

Vicki Noble by Irene Young

Heide Goettner-Abendroth

Monica Mody

Scholar Salons are invited presentations by major scholars and researchers, in which they discuss their work with ASWM members. Salons are offered as a member benefit. We do not schedule Salons with individuals whose work has been submitted in the same cycle for our awards program. In addition to contributions of foremothers and established scholars, Salons also focus on important emerging work by doctoral students, artists, and award winners. There are only 100 seats available per Salon, so please register early!

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May 17, 2023January 9, 2024

Hallie Iglehart Austen Receives 2023 Demeter Award for Leadership

See video HERE In 2010, when ASWM held its first biennial international meeting, we established the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality as a lifetime achievement award. At this year’s conference, the recipient ie author-activist Hallie Iglehart Austen. Our letter to her reads as follows: The 2023 Demeter Award is given in recognition of your decades of visionary scholarship as a founding mother of feminist art, culture, and spiritual practice. We recognize your work as a teacher, bringing the message about the Goddess through conferences, workshops and writing. We also recognize your commitment to sustainable living, and your activism for the protection of marine life and the ocean. We honor your celebration of the connections among all things, and the hopeful message you bring at this time of crisis. Your first book, Womenspirit, A Guide to Women’s Wisdom, published in 1983, grew out of your voyage of discovery, promoting the practice of meditation and the creation of a personal mythology. For your second book, The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, you collected remarkable images and symbols of goddesses from world cultures. It has been hailed as “an exultantly female-centric text whose wisdom is universal.” First published in 1991, this beloved book has now been released in a new edition by Monkfish press. In the 2000s you were inspired by your work with the divine feminine to focus on initiatives for the protection of oceans and sea life. In 2001 you co-founded Seaflow: Protect Our Oceans to educate people about the dangers of active sonars and other ocean noise to whales, dolphins, and all sea life. In 2010 you initiated All One Ocean: Cleaning Up the Oceans, One Beach at a Time. This work of organizing people to come together on local projects of habitat restoration sets an example of how forming grassroots initiatives can make a difference for the fate of the planet, its oceans and sea creatures. Your work has combined your knowledge of indigenous Goddess wisdom with activism for the environment in a way that is truly inspirational. Our board and members honor you as one of the premier visionary feminist thinkers of our time, and thank you for your scholarly, literary, healing, and cultural leadership. The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in the field of goddess studies. Previous honorees for the Demeter Award have included Margot Adler (2010), Charlene Spretnak (2012), Jean Shinoda Bolen (2014), Elinor Gadon and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (2016), Kathy Jones (2018), and Vicki Noble and Judy Grahn (2020).

May 14, 2023January 9, 2024

Dr. Mara Lynn Keller Receives 2023 Saga Award

The ASWM Board of Directors established the Saga Award in 2012 to recognize outstanding contributions to women’s history and culture. The 2023 recipient is Dr. Mara Lynn Keller, recently retired from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Her award letter reads in part:

This award recognizes your service to individual women as a teacher and mentor, and your major contributions to feminist philosophy, Goddess thealogy, the field of Women’s Spirituality, social justice, and global peace.

In your roles as teacher and mentor, you have always put the needs of your students first, demonstrating tremendous spiritual generosity in supporting your students and your peers in their academic and personal endeavors.

During your thirty-year tenure as Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Women’s Spirituality, you have chaired many Ph.D. dissertations and MA theses, and have helped to generate a treasure trove of knowledge and a love for Women’s Spirituality. As Director of the Women’s Spirituality programs at CIIS, you fostered and developed a program offering an extraordinary curriculum and producing original scholarship that could have emerged no place else.

Your numerous articles and book chapters on your specialty, the Eleusinian Mysteries, have been widely read and influenced a generation of young scholars. We look forward to your forthcoming multi-volume work The Greater Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone and The Eleusinian Mysteries and Greek Goddess Traditions which will encapsulate a lifetime of research and thinking about the Mysteries.

Your commitment to embodied spirituality and multicultural eco-social justice is evidenced in your teaching, writing, and all your work in the world.

The ASWM awards program was established by our co-founder, Patricia Monaghan, to advance the best work in all fields related to goddess studies. Previous Saga Award honorees include Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Genevieve Vaughan, Z Budapest, Donna Read, Peggy Sanday, Arisika Razak, and Jane Caputi.

April 19, 2023January 9, 2024

2023 Panel: Currents of Mystery: Shapeshifting, Bears, and the Crane Maiden

ASWM Conference May 5-6, Syracuse NY

2023 ASWM Schedule

Registration Links and Conference information here

4:15-5:45 Friday May 5 (schedule subject to change)

Panel 7: Currents of Mystery: Shapeshifting, Bears, and the Crane Maiden

Mahealani Ahia, “Kihawahine: Shapeshifting Lives of Hawaiiʻs Reptilian Water Deity”
Carla Ionescu, “Water, Bears and Rites of Passage – A Walk Through the Forgotten Temple of Artemis at Brauron”
Brenda Peterson, “The Crane Maiden: A Love Story”

PRESENTERS

Māhealani Ahia (she/we/ʻo ia) is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist, scholar, activist, songcatcher, and storykeeper. Her theatre arts, writing, and performance from U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Irvine, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as well as her Masters Degree in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute empower her Indigenous feminist decolonial creations, and as editor for Hawaiʻi Review, ʻŌiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, and Mauna Kea Syllabus Project.

Dr. Carla Ionescu focuses her work on the worship and ritual of the goddess Artemis, both in the Greek world and the Near East. She spends most of her time teaching in the field of Ancient History and Mythology and developing The Artemis Research Centre. She travels regularly to Europe and the United States as a guest lecturer, and also leads workshops and retreats in the field of Ancient Mythology and World Religions.

Brenda Peterson Through her work as a novelist and nature writer, Brenda’s curiosity about and respect for nature radiates through her 23 books. Her book “Crane Maiden,” illustrated by Ed Young, was created during pandemic isolation. “As Ed was playing with shadows in his collage art of paper and feathers, my crane dreams returned to haunt my midnights. We found solace in these sacred cranes and hope this story comforts all ages, keeps memories alive of those we have lost, but may find again in another world—even another form. With wings.”

April 18, 2023January 9, 2024

2023 Panel: Seas of Inspiration: Myths and Sacred Stories for Young People

ASWM Conference May 5-6, Syracuse NY

Registration Links and Conference information here

2023 ASWM Schedule

2:15-3:45 Saturday May 6 (schedule subject to change)

Panel 11: Seas of inspiration: Myths and Sacred Stories for Young People

María Suárez Toro, ”Literary Creation of a Matriarchal Ancestral Character to Tell Stories”
Rebecca Migdal Kilicaslan, “Improvisational Puppet Theater as a Space for Alchemical Transformation of Myth”
Sarah Chandler, “Ancient Cisterns and Nabaten Irrigation: Water Injustice in Israel/Palestine as a Channel for Modern Jewish Spirituality”

PRESENTERS

María Suárez Toro is a PHD in Pedagogical Mediation of Holistic Paradigms, currently, a community underwater archaeology graduate, a feminist journalist, a human rights activist, an educator, a fisherwoman and scuba diver, and writer. She was born in Puerto Rico and has been a resident of San José, Costa Rica for close to 50 years. She is coordinator of a youth community diving center Ambassadors of the Sea in Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean. She was a co-director of the Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE) from 1991 to 2011, of which she is a co-founder.

Rebecca Migdal Kilicaslan, MA, MFA is an artist, performer and author working with dreams and myths. A co-founder of Book & Puppet Co., a bookstore and puppet theater in Easton, Pennsylvania, she studied Dream Tending with Steve Aizenstat, and is a doctoral candidate in Jungian Psychology and Archetypes at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Rebecca teaches visual art at East Stroudsburg University.

Sarah Chandler aka Kohenet (Hebrew Priestess) Shamirah teaches, writes and consults on a national level on issues related to Judaism, earth-based spiritual practice, the environment, mindfulness, and farming. Sarah is the founder and lead trainer of “Soft as a Rock: Public Speaking for Sensitive Souls.”