the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and a first general meeting was held in San Marcos, Texas. In 2004, Vaughan edited a special edition of the Italian journal Athanor: Semiotica, Filosofia, Arte, Letteratura, with work by 25 contributors from 15 countries on five continents. The edition was titled Il Dono/The Gift: A feminist analysis. It begins: "This collection of articles is the product of an international network of women who embrace in one way or another the idea of the logic of gift giving as the basis of a paradigm shift for social change." While uneven, this book won some early kudos for Vaughan's theory of the gift economy. The publication debuted at a conference in Las Vegas in November 2004, which had more than 30 speakers. They included scholars, indigenous women, educators, prominent organizers, spiritual leaders, and grassroots women. Among the more well-known speakers were Mililani Trask, a leader of the Hawaiian indigenous sovereignty movement; Salvadoran theologian Marta Benavides; indigenous Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen; Greek-American evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris; American feminist shaman Vicki Noble; Heide Göttner-Abendroth, from Germany, founder of Modern Matriarchal Studies; Dr. Kaarina Kailo from Finland; women's development specialist Peggy Antrobus from Barbados; and Corinne Kumar, founder of the World Courts of Women in Tunisia. Proceedings from the conference were published by Innana Press of Toronto in 2007. Panels on the Gift Economy are presented by the women of the network at many conferences and events, including World Social Forums, the triennial Women's Worlds conferences, and Matriarchal Studies conferences. In 2009, Vaughan and Göttner-Abendroth co-convened an embedded conference within a Motherhood Studies conference at York University in Toronto; it was titled A (M)Otherworld Is Possible. A video record is online. The Mothering Paradigm In 2015, Vaughan released the book The Gift in the Heart of Language: The Maternal Source of Meaning (Mimesis International, 2015). In this book, Vaughan cites recent infant psychology research to strengthen her epistemological argument that the mother-child experience is the key paradigm for the structure of both verbal and material communication. Among the characteristics of this paradigm are the central value attributed to the receivers of gifts, and the community-building aspect of both verbal and material gifts. Vaughan criticizes patriarchal, capitalist monetization of gift-giving into a measurable forced exchange, calling it an expropriation of the psychological mechanism of parent-child interaction. The release of the book was accompanied by a conference on