ACADEMIC WORK'Self-reliant' refugees as 'development actors': Dignity or disavowal of responsibility?
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Negotiating gender norms in the context of equal access to education in north-western Tigray, Ethiopia |
Girls in Tigray region in North Ethiopia have over the past decade started to outnumber boys up through primary and secondary education in terms of enrolment rates. But underage marriage still hampers rural girls pursuit of education in north-western Tigray. Left unchallenged by governmental efforts to address marriage of underage girls is the female virginity ideal and the burden of sexual morality which girls continue to shoulder, and that sustains the practice. It is also a fact that despite positive enrolment rates, girls score on average lower than boys on the national exams. This article explores whether the modesty that girls are socialised into through the virginity ideal in order to acquire respect in the community impinges on the assertive drive and energy necessary for educational success. What will be addressed here are gender norms that continue to be reproduced in spite of the signicant changes in Ethiopia's laws and policies to amend former gender injustice, and which have brought unprecedented numbers of Ethiopian girls into school.
Read the article in Gender and Education 30(2) 2018 or here |
Kan Trump stoppe kvinners abortrett? |
Vi må stole på kvinnene i abortspørsmålet, sa den mannlige ungdomsrepresentanten fra Uganda i sin presentasjon på den afrikanske abortkonferansen i Addis Ababa, Etiopia i november 2016. Han høstet stor applaus fra de afrikanske delegatene som var i overveldende flertall på konferansen. Trumps gjeninnføring av den globale munnkurvsregelen (global gag rule) som forbyr statlig støtte til organisasjoner som tilbyr, eller gir informasjon om, trygg abort, viser med all tydelighet mangel på tillit til kvinner i spørsmålet om abort. Men vil kvinner og deres støttespillere la seg stoppe av USAs tredje runde med global munnkurv i abortspørsmålet?
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Co-photographing in north-western Tigray, Ethiopia![]() My argument in this article, which starts from the assertion that anthropological research is always dependent on cross-cultural collaboration – whether acknowledged or not – is based on my experience as a photographic artist and photographing anthropologist. The photographic portraits that resulted from Tigrayan people taking control over their own self-representation in a process of “co-photographing” made me “see” the subtle socio-cultural dynamics of layering communication mediated through exposure and containment, visibility and invisibility. However, Western ethical guidelines that require the anonymization of participants, and which makes it difficult to acknowledge people’s contributions to our research, reaffirm, rather than challenge the presumed inequality between the researcher and the researched.
Read the article in AnthroVison 5(2) 2017 |
Imagining the Real
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Concerned with rethinking photography in visual anthropology this exploratory discussion starts from the presumption that presence in photographs is evoked through absence of the real. What is not problematized in photographic theory and visual anthropology is that photographs thus depend on imagination for their interpretative connection to reality. My argument sees photographic practice as interference, which pushes the medium past the implicit positivist premise for visual knowledge production in anthropology. Furthermore, when understanding the ability to imagine as movements in reason, the separation between imagination and reason, presumed necessary for the scientific production of knowledge, is also challenged.
Read the article in Visual Anthropology 30(1) 2017 or here
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Whose authority?
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The discussion in this article takes as point of departure the common assumption that committed religiosity hinders contraceptive use and abortion as the person would be obliged to comply with what is perceived as God’s will and give birth to the number of children He gives. However, among the women (aged 18-75) who were included in this ethnographic study in one rural and one semi-urban area in Asgede Tsimbla Wereda in north-western Tigray in North-Ethiopia, there existed considerable confusion and opposing opinions about what the Orthodox Christian Church’s official stand on contraceptive use actually is. Even priests were not in agreement on the issue when asked individually. Furthermore, the interpretive indeterminacy in the common-sense understanding of the transition between God’s power and the person’s control, as reflected in the concept of ïddïl (fate/destiny), points to the uncertainty entailed when attempting to define how religion conditions decision-making. Considered significant in women’s narrative accounts when legitimisation of contraceptive use is at issue, are the agentive negotiations involved when moving authority, in a discursive sense, away from the church and the field of religion to the field of science where the government backs women’s reproductive choice as a right.
Published in Annales d'Ethiopie No. 30 2015. Special Issue on Women, Gender and Religions in Ethiopia Download the article here |
Having fewer children makes it possible to educate them all
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Education is presumed to play a decisive role in decreasing fertility rates. This article is about the role of education and other factors in fertility decline in the context of current Ethiopian policies on population and sustainable development, based on an ethnographic study of women’s agency and girls’ pursuit of education in one semi-urban and one rural area in north-western Tigray, in northern Ethiopia. Long-term environmental insecurity and scarcity of arable land for the younger generation in this area serve as important background. Another central issue in the study was the religious conditioning of women’s choices, which stood out most clearly in the case of contraceptive use. In those cases where women’s contestations of the authority of the Orthodox Christian priests concurred with current Ethiopian policies on fertility decline, this was based on what women defined as their own authority in reproductive matters linked with flexible adaptation to their life-situations.
Read the article in Reproductive Health Matters, 22(43) 2014 (open access) At the frontiers of change?
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