CIIS Women's Spirituality

What connects Palestine 1492 to the Zapatista movement to our present moment? Dr. Linda Quiquivix traces 500 years of global struggle and solidarity. In this clip, she tell us what she’s learned from the Zapatista movement in Chiapas: leadership that has to obey the people it represents, not command them. Serve, don’t be served. Build, don’t destroy. Propose, don’t impose. Watch her full workshop on our YouTube channel. Link in bio.

What does tarot have to do with ecofeminism? Dr. Daniella Orias created the Rooted Wisdom Ecofeminist Tarot to find out — 26 digitally collaged cards built from the work of bell hooks, Val Plumwood, and Jane Caputi. In this workshop, she shares the research behind the deck and invites participants to design their own card. Watch at the link in bio.

The Women’s Spirituality program at CIIS offers a transdisciplinary, multicultural, and socially-engaged approach to the study of feminism, spirituality, and religion.

Offerings include an M.A. in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice, and a Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality.

Karla Enedina Gómez-Pelayo earned her MA in Women, Gender, Spirituality and Social Justice at CIIS and is now a PhD student in Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. In her talk, Theory in the Flesh: Embodied Scholarship for Collective Liberation, she talks about how a single conference at San Francisco State changed her sense of what organizing could look like. She tells the story of her confusion over her own immigration status and identity to running full conferences for undocumented students—funded by selling tamales. Full presentation on YouTube. Link in bio.

Samantha Turner came to birth work through a motherline project in her first semester at CIIS. Her capstone presentation, Eco-Womanist Activism and Community Healing Through Birth Work, Trauma Care, and Decolonial Praxis, traces the lineage of Black midwives and root workers and the decolonial practice she carries forward through her doula work in Detroit. This clip is her on Harriet Tubman as an eco-womanist blueprint. Congratulations, Samantha!

Full presentation on YouTube — link in bio.

Meet Goddess Queen Jahmela, one of our recently graduated M.A. students in Women, Gender, Spirituality and Social Justice. An Ifa practitioner, ceremonialist, and founder of Free the Feminine, she presented From Colonial Christianity to Indigenous Cosmology: Black Diasporic Women and the Reconstitution of Sacred Authority — drawing on interviews with twelve women who left Christianity to pursue indigenous African spiritual practices. Congratulations!

Full presentation on YouTube — link in bio.

Jessica Nuñez-LaMarre is an electrical engineer, a mother, and a spiritual scholar who left her religion, her marriage, and her career in search of something she couldn’t explain yet. In her capstone presentation, My Story, My Healing, My Calling, she details her search through feminist theology, mujerista theology, and spiritual activism, and tells us what she found on the other side. Congratulations Jessica Nuñez-LaMarre - Theologian | Author | Mother | Engineer!

Full presentation on YouTube — link in bio.

Hailey Hunter grew up in conservative evangelical Christianity, spent years leading healing retreats for women, and came to CIIS because she didn’t want to write another self-help book without reckoning with patriarchy, religion, and the systems that teach women to abandon themselves. Her capstone presentation, Wildish: Reclaiming Your Instinctual Self, introduces the book she is writing. Congratulations, Hailey!

Full presentation on YouTube — link in bio.

In A Healing Journey: The “Hidden” Story of Black Women and Trauma, M.A. graduate Maya Stroud approaches her subject from a Black feminist and womanist framework — and from her own experience as a survivor of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. Congratulations, Maya!

Full presentation on YouTube — link in bio.