International Conference on the Gift Economy
Nov 12-14, 2004: Las Vegas, Nevada

A Radically Different World View is Possible

The gift economy inside and outside of Patriarchal Capitalism

Corinne Kumar

Biographical Information

With an abiding faith in women's knowledge and all vulnerable wisdoms, Corinne Kumar is a woman deeply committed to issues related to human rights and peace. Academically qualified with a master's degrees in Sociology and Political Science, she abandoned her doctoral studies in search of a more relevant and enhancing political praxis. She left the gardens of academia to walks in the forests of social reality.

She has initiated and sustained groups at the local, regional and international level, whose core is transformational politics that is rooted in a more caring and compassionate society, in immediate, lived realities. These include the Centre for Development Studies (Cieds Collective), Vimochana, a forum for women's rights, both based in Bangalore, India and the Asian Women Human Rights Council, a regional network of women's and human rights organisations. She has been the founder Director of all these organisations and has been a driving force for their work and vision, for almost three decades.

For the past decade, she has been on the Board of Directors and the Secretary-General of El Taller, an international NGO based in Tunis that through its perspectives and programmes, focuses on the global south including training programmes for NGO activists, attempts to create spaces for constructive reflection and action on the important issues of our times, enabling and facilitating south-south and north-south dialogue. She is a part of several international networks and groups related to issues of human rights, peace and alternative visions.

She has also initiated through Awhrc and El Taller, a movement that has come to be known as the Courts of Women, that are an attempt to create alternative political spaces, where women are listened to as victims, survivors and resistors; the Courts speak to the disruption of the dominant logic, to the subversion of the dominant knowledge; they are an attempt to add to the writing of a counter-hegemonic history, to weave together the objective reality (through analyses of the issues) with the subjective testimonies of the women; the personal with the political; the logical with the lyrical (through poetic and artistic images) and towards creating other ways to know; towards creating a new knowledge paradigm: twenty Courts of Women have been held in different regions of the world over the last ten years.

Corinne is sometimes poet but always learning, always pilgrim of life.

Articles about
the Gift Economy

Radio Interviews

Il Dono/ The Gift: A Feminist Analysis

Gift Economy Website

Conference Endorsers