ASWM Scholar Salon with Dr. Donna Giancola. In the Name of the Goddess: A Biophilic Ethic. "A biophilic ethic goes beyond traditional ethical theories by incorporating a a perspective of inter-connectedness and co-dependency with Nature. By invoking the mythical notion of justice, it becomes embodied, and personal, reflecting a subtle shift of consciousness".
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In her memoir, novelist Jamie Figueroa excavates her roots from her childhood, cutting into them across generations and unearthing them on the island of Puerto Rico, the homeland of her Taíno ancestors. As a child, the author first understood herself as a member of a “feminine collective” that contained her mother and her two older sisters, even as they all rode the roller coaster of her mother’s history of trauma, emotional unpredictability and dependency, and her series of marriages to white men. Jamie chronicles her journey through her work in the healing arts, the ending of her own marriage to a white man (“a hand-me-down version of one of my mother’s”), and the practice and profession of writing and teaching. Addressing Puerto Rico’s complicated relationship to the mainland U.S., she explores its nuances, along with associated topics of race, internalized colonization, and assimilation.
“Her exceptional command of her craft builds narrative tension while granting force to the way her personal history mirrors geopolitical devastation and imbuing her voice with the power of one no longer unclaimed by, but ready to lay claim to. Mother Island is a searching and lyrical memoir packed with nuance and depth.” (Starred Kirkus Review of Mother Island, Nov 28, 2023)
Join us in this Salon as Jamie reads from her memoir and engages us in a deep conversation on the themes of her work and her writing process.
Jamie Figueroa
Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Jamie Figueroa’s mixed-race Puerto Rican heritage of Black/Indigenous/Spanish drives her fiction and creative nonfiction themes. As a woman of color from the Caribbean diaspora, she writes into the complexities of a multi-faceted identity. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award. Jamie is on faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, The New York Times, and The Boston Review, among others. MOTHER ISLAND was named among the LA Times “6 books to shake off colonialism and rethink our Latino stories.” Jamie Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.
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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:
Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
with Guadalupe Urbina, singer-songwriter/poet/artist/activist
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
“In this Salon we will look at shifting from lateral violence to lateral kindness as an expression of an emerging cultural paradigm. Lateral kindness is the reclamation of our pre colonial cultures and authentic identities, where care for one another was central to our survival and wellbeing. Respect is a key tenet to all healthy and intact cultures across the world.”
Lateral violence is the direct result of the colonial patriarchy that we have been subjected to for millennia. Shifting away from the embedded patterns of lateral violence and moving toward lateral kindness is the first step in creating a healthier path forward for us all. Replacing competition with community is a good starting point, as we have been consistently pitted against each other for access to opportunities and resources creating fractures and distrust. We must now work to rebuild reciprocal relationships and partnerships where wealth, prosperity, and success are redefined and where resources and opportunities are shared within and between communities.
In the Forest, public domain photo
Sherri Mitchell -Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset, is an Indigenous attorney, activist, and author from the Penobscot Nation. She is an alumna of the American Indian Ambassador Program and the Udall Native American Congressional Internship Program. Sherri is the author of Sacred Instructions; Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change and a contributor to more than a dozen anthologies, including the best-seller All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis and Growing Up Native in America.
Sherri Mitchell -Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset
Sherri is the Executive Director of the Land Peace Foundation, an educational organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of the Indigenous way of life and environmental equity and justice. She has worked with some of the largest NGO’s in the world on decolonizing relationships between Peoples and lands. She currently serves as a Trustee for the American Indian Institute, an Indigenous Advisory Council member for Nia Tero’s Indigenous Land Guardianship Program, and a board member for the Post Carbon Institute. Sherri is the recipient of several human rights and humanitarian awards, and her portrait is featured in the esteemed portrait series, Americans Who Tell the Truth. She is also the convener of the global healing ceremony – Healing the Wounds of Turtle Island, a gathering that has brought together more than fifty-thousand people from six continents to focus on healing our relationships with one another and with our relatives in the natural world.
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Save these dates for these upcoming ASWM Salons:
Thursday, May 16 , 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time:
with Jamie Figueroa, “Mother Island: A Daughter Claims Puerto Rico”
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Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
with Guadalupe Urbina, singer-songwriter/poet/artist/activist
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
“Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press” with Jocelyn Cohen and Julia Allen Thursday, March 21, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Time
Trackwomen on the Baltimore and Ohio, 1943
In 1973, Jocelyn Helaine Cohen and Nancy Victoria Poore established Helaine Victoria Press to publish women’s history postcards. Spurred by the energy of the second wave feminist movement, they learned how to research histories buried in old books and archives and how to print on a vintage letterpress. “The beginning of HV Press in 1973 and the end of the press in 1990 brackets a kind of extraordinary, exuberant women’s revolution both within the academy as well as throughout aspects of life in the Western world.” (Prof. Susan Gubar, author, Madwoman in the Attic).
International Ladies Garment Workers Union voter drive, 1936
Jocelyn Cohen and Julia Allen discuss how such a venture began, including the challenges of becoming independent scholars, offset and letterpress printers and publishers. They show how, by creating postcards, Helaine Victoria Press did more than provide a convenient writing surface; instead, they explain, the press aimed to generate feminist memory. The multimodal cards, like the movement from which they emanated, were dynamic and participatory. This salon captures the story of how HV Press used an ephemeral popular art form to ignite interest in women’s history told within a feminist construct of feminist memory.
Women Making History (2023)
Julia and Jocelyn’s book, Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press (2023), is the first book to demonstrate the relationships between the feminist art movement, the women in print movement, and the scholars studying women’s history. It is available from Lever Press, which is funded by a consortium of small liberal arts colleges, and dedicated to the principle of open access, but also offers print editions of their books. Read it and see many archived images here.
Julia Allen and Jocelyn Cohen
Jocelyn H. Cohen – fine artist, letterpress printer, author, designer, art director, arborist and aesthetic Pruner is principal at Poetree Landscapes & Arboriculture. Her self-published previous books are, The Spirit & Craft of Chinese Ritual Papers, a hand made art book held in several collections including The British Museum and Harvard-Yenching Library and editor Let’s Get Rolling: Simplified Vegetarian Cookery in a Simplified Kitchen by Alma Hecht. Jocelyn’s large oil paintings can be viewed at Indiana University, Kokomo in the Administration Building.
Julia M. Allenis professor emerita of English at Sonoma State University. She holds a Ph.D.in English with a focus on Rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous book, Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, State University of New York Press, 2013, won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle in 2014. Her most recent book, co-authored with Jocelyn H. Cohen, is Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press.
This work focuses on the emergence of our ancient mythical conceptions of justice as alive and biophilic. By definition, biophilia means the love of life, but do we love life enough to save it?
Utilizing ancient goddess myths as a philosophical basis of justice as the force of Nature, I propose a biophilic ethic that envisions a holistic ethics of interconnectedness, ecological sustainability, and elemental justice. Beginning with a cross cultural examination of ancient goddess myths and stories establishes our earliest conceptions of justice as a living dynamic portraying a cosmological and ecological balance. Quintessentially, such conceptions of justice as preserved and illustrated in ancient goddess myths reflect/demand a living ethos which stands in sharp contrast to our present patriarchal conceptions, practices, and international policies. Patriarchal ethical theories and practices fail to recognize that the ground on which we stand is a livingweb of relationships.
In the Name of the Goddess by Donna Giancola
A biophilic ethic goes beyond traditional ethical theories by incorporating a a perspective of inter-connectedness and co-dependency with Nature. By invoking the mythical notion of justice, it becomes embodied, and personal, reflecting a subtle shift of consciousness. A significant sense of connection, interdependence and responsibility to the earth arises out our ancient goddess myths and practices, and challenges us to revolutionize ourselves. These mythical conceptions of justice stand as a reminder that Nature is the inventor, and she holds all the pattens and power over, life, death, and ecological growth.
Donna Giancola and Magic
Dr. Donna M. Giancola is an associate professor of Philosophy and director of Religious Studies at Suffolk University in Boston. Her latest book, In the Name of the Goddess: A Biophilic Ethic, is an ecofeminist call for conscious action and revolutionary thinking. She has written numerous articles on comparative religion and philosophy, feminism and eco-feminism, and has lectured extensively in national and international forums from Boston and Hawaii to Oxford, England New Delhi, India, and Bangkok, Thailand. She has also co-authored, a philosophy textbook, World Ethics, (Wadsworth) and an eco-feminist novel, Her Underground, (Solstice Publishers). Currently, she divides her time between teaching Philosophy in Boston and conjuring and writing in St. Augustine Beach FL.
(In spite of her sunny disposition and attempts at being inspirational, she has been known to have an irreverent word or two to say. Lately, she has gotten her days and nights confused, insists that there is no path to hell, and that the Earth is already in Heaven. Her old English sheepdog is strangely happy. Other projects she is crafting include in a Goddess Ritual book, and a new novel.)
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Thanks to artist Lauren Raine for permission to include Pachamama in our announcement! See more of her work at Masks of the Goddess.
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Save these dates for this upcoming ASWM Salon:
May2 , 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time:
with Sherri Mitchell, “Moving from Lateral Oppression to a Culture of Kindness”
May 30, 2024 at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time
with Guadalupe Urbina, singer-songwriter/poet/artist/activist
This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.
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