Kalendarium

CCD seminar: Schooling vs. Education: the making of rebellious subjects in postwar Ethiopia

Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw is a cultural and political historian and a postdoc who is affiliated with the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University.

His talk will focus on how university students in Addis Ababa, and Addis Ababans generally, in the postwar period reshaped the "hegemonic" discourses they received from state-affiliated institutions (the university, the theater and the like) to form a rebellious cultural and political subjectivity that paved the way for the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974. This historical understanding of the Ethiopian Revolution encourages us to view education, self making, and cultural formation as processes involving a complex interplay between subject formation from above (for example, the imperial state and its institutions) and from below (students, urban dwellers and the general citizenry). It also encourages us to view discourses and practices associated with modernity as being contested and as being informed not just by the ideas and interests of a ruling clique but also by the ideas and interests of the ruled, often with transformative and unexpected consequences.

Chair: Tesfaye Ayele, PhD student in the CuEEd-LL research graduate school

Zoom: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/62849906150?pwd=QUJ5cCtNVnJyZWo1WGFXVUx2T1Ivdz09