2024 – New Vistas – Just got an essay published in the FAR – Feminism and Religion blog originally created by feminist thealogian Carol P. Christ, a pioneer in feminist theology and women’s spirituality.
Check it out here: Incredibly! The Inquisitional Cultural Mechanism Rears its Hydra Head by Elisabeth Sikie
WOMEN RISING! NEW VISIONS FOR A POST-PATRIARCHAL WORLD 
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The Women’s Spirituality graduate studies program at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) is excited to announce Women Rising! New Visions for a Post-Patriarchal World, a dynamic 2.5-day conference to be held October 12–14 2018 at the CIIS campus.
Women Rising! will gather 200 visionaries, educators, artists, practitioners, care workers, and social justice activists, including keynote speaker Sherri Mitchell and other Women’s Spirituality trailblazers, such as Charlene Spretnak, Starhawk, Arisika Razak, and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum to celebrate the inspiring and groundbreaking eco-social justice work that women do.
WHERE: CIIS, 1453 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
WHEN: October 12–14. Friday, 5:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.; Saturday, 9:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.; Sunday, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
“We are at critical juncture in human evolution,” says Dr. Alka Arora, core faculty in Women’s Spirituality at CIIS. “Movements such as #MeToo, #TimesUp, #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNoMore, and #NeverAgain are creating profound global change. Women are at the forefront of such movements, and Women Rising! grows out of the spiritual and political movements of today, seeking to redress the misogyny, sexual violence, institutionalized racism, economic oppression, and ecological devastation that patriarchal societies have wrought.”
This landmark conference includes breakout sessions, workshops, live performances, ceremonies, film screenings, networking opportunities, an evening with Jennifer Berezan & Friends in concert, the Once and Future Goddess art exhibition, AmyJo Mattheis’ one-woman play From Eve to Me, the Women’s Spirituality 25th Anniversary Book Awards, and more. It seeks to honor, ignite, connect, and empower every person’s innate divinity and invites participants to celebrate and co-create a visionary culture and activism that promotes a plurality of voices and change-makers who are actively building a new, post-patriarchal world.
My presentation:
Sacred Female Communions with Nature: Stories of Glaciers
To register or to learn more about Women Rising!, visit www.womenrisingconference.org.
Pacific Northwest Region of the AAR/SBL & ASOR
2018 Annual Meeting
Hosted by
Pacific Lutheran University
in
Tacoma, Washington
May 11-13, 2018
My presentation:
The Creation Myth as Metaphysical Model: Original Female Consciousness and Parthenogenetic Power
For more information on the conference, please visit http://pnw-aarsbl.org/
Previous events:
2018 Conference
Scholarly Speculations: Animal, Earth, Person, Story
March 16 – 17, 2018
Las Vegas, Nevada
I was part of the Archaeomythology Panel, facilitated by Joan Marler, founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology that addressed Archaeomythological Explorations: Honoring Sacred Kinship Between Women, Plants, and Animals along with scholars Mara Keller, Joan Cichon, and Susan Moulton
My presentation can be viewed here around the 56:00 mark
The Personhood of Nature and an Indigenous Consciousness of Communion – Stories of Bees and Glaciers
For more information on the conference, please visit ASWM’s website.
I am proud to be published in Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 of She Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Writings in Womanist/Feminist Spirituality, which is a juicy representation of contemporary Women’s Spirituality writing and scholarship.
The contributors published in this series are some of the most innovative thinkers in academia, including the fields of religion, theology, philosophy, shamanism, and art.
Women Spirituality researchers are some of the hardest working scholars on the planet because we are often dismissed, not for the merits of our intensive scholarship, but because of our content. I think of us as excavators of subaltern history who “dance backwards in high heels.”
This series of three anthologies are the brain child of the great Dr. Lucia Birnbaum.
I am also proud to have published an article in tandem with my mother, Karol Sikie, who was an advocate for victims of domestic violence and their children, and a pioneer in this field in California for a decade before her passing in 2011.
The Violence and Abuse in Society SeriesWe collaborated on “How the Legal System Revictimizes Victims of Domestic Violence and Their Children: Systemic Abuse in the California Family Court,” which was published in the four volume set Violence and Abuse in Society: Understanding A Global Crisis, edited by Angela Browne-MIller, PhD. Our piece was included in volume 2, Faces of Intimate Partner Violence, 299 – 309.
The Violence and Abuse in Society Series
Karol Rose Sikie
April 14, 1943 – July 17, 2011
Karol Rose Sikie died on July 17, 2011 in her Torrance home after a brave battle with cancer. She was surrounded by her family and passed into the realm of the ancestors in a circle of love and appreciation for the tremendous efforts she made during her life to help others. Karol Rose was born on April 14, 1943 in Glendale, California to Elsa Varga Richards, a New York model and a Ziegfeld Girl, and Elvin ‘Kink’ Richards, a former New York Giant who was honored in the Football Hall of Fame. Karol was their only daughter and the sister of her older brother Jonathan, whom she adored. His death from cancer was one of the greatest tragedies of her life. Karol married her high school sweetheart Michael Sikie at the age of eighteen and had three children, Lisa, Karen, and Michael. She later married Richard Tibbett, and raised her children in Torrance. Karol received her certificate in ASL from El Camino College where she met her friend and colleague Susan Iten. This skill ignited her interest in community service and she began volunteering in local battered women’s shelters where she gave employment readiness workshops. However, the women in the shelter needed someone to go to court with them for restraining orders. So it was in 1992, Karol Sikie co-founded New Life Advocacy, a non-profit agency in Los Angeles, California with her colleague Susan Iten. Their mission was to advocate in the Family Court System for Victims of Domestic Violence. Karol became Executive Director and Susan assumed the role of Program Coordinator. Together this dynamic duo provided their unique Family Court Advocacy Program to more than three thousand victims of domestic violence and accumulated twenty-eight hundred hours of court time. Through New Life Advocacy’s Certified Court Advocacy Program, they trained and certified more than six-hundred domestic violence service providers from every county in California to assist battered women in the family court system. Karol was a strong and dynamic woman who was proud of her Hungarian and Iowan heritage. She was devoted to her family. She enjoyed traveling to places in New York where her mother grew up after their family emigrated from Hungary to escape the Communist occupation. Karol considered herself a feminist and raised her daughters to be likewise strong, independent and proud. She was especially known for the joy she took in being a mother and she felt a special love for children and animals. This passion, combined with her fight for justice and equality for women, made her a powerful legal advocate for victims of domestic violence and their children. She will be remembered by many as instrumental in helping them escape lives of violence. She is survived by her loving husband Richard; her children, Lisa, Karen, and Michael; her sister-in-law, Shannon; her cousins, Sue and Marilyn; and all of their children who brought her so much joy. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to: New Life Advocacy PMB# 5598, 21213-B Hawthorne Blvd. Torrance, CA 90503 or your local Animal Rescue.