“Women Everyday resistance and Activism in Ethiopia” – CFEE x AAU x LoWoVo
“Women Everyday resistance and Activism in Ethiopia”
May 8, 2025 – At Ras Mekonen Hall
Registration link (limited to 25 persons) : https://forms.gle/kSRL1xTv5C2hJv2A8
About the event
This academic conference and public debate is the first stage in a collective book project on Women, Everyday Resistances, and Activism in Ethiopia. This meeting will help to gather chapter contributors, initiate our dialogue, and refine our perspectives. It will be followed by a debate with Civil Society Organizations’ activists. This proposal stems from the ongoing research project “Location of Women Voices and Power in Ethiopia (LoWoVo)”, started in 2023 and carried out jointly by the IES at Addis Ababa University and IRD in France, with the support of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies. The project aims to investigate how women in diverse Ethiopian contexts engage with the gendered power dynamics that shape their experiences, from everyday resistance to open forms of activism.
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Studies about women and gender in Ethiopia have been considerably extended over the last two decades. Scholarship involves all the disciplines of social sciences and humanities and investigates gender relations of power and gendered experience, though a wide range of topics such as health and reproductive health (Hirut, 2012; Mulumebet, 2006), industrial labor (Kokebe, Fekadu & Tadesse, 2018), agriculture (Sintayehu 2003) religion (JES, 2002), indigenous institutions (Muluken, 2021), women rights (Meron & Meskerem, 2020) etc… to mention only few. In addition to academic publications and PhD thesis, hundreds of master theses have been written. This corpus of studies constitutes a considerable amount of knowledge about the relations of power women are caught in, and the way they deal with them across generations, social classes, and cultural groups. It highlights the spectrum and properties of patriarchal structures and everyday forms of negotiation and resistance, and enables complex intersectional approaches.
In the meantime, studies on women activism investigates how women collectively organized in order to promote women’s autonomy, rights, and emancipation (Netsanet, 2022; Tigest, 2016; Gennet, 2014; Bisewar, 2012). Women activism in Ethiopia has a long history: from the Ethiopian Women Welfare Association (EWWA) established during the Italian occupation and active until the 1974 revolution, women’s organization within the Ethiopian student movement, the Derg’s state-controlled Revolutionary Ethiopian Women Association (REWA), the organizations established since the 1990s as the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), until the Yellow Movement, Setaweet, and the myriad of associations federated under the Network of Ethiopian Women Association (NEWA). This history testifies to a variety of discourses and practices. To put it broadly, movements may vary from ‘differentialists’ trends, which struggle for equality within gender difference, to more overt critics of gender roles. They can have different legal status, from state-controlled, state-sponsored, officially registered associations, to clandestine organizations; and diverse and changing relations to the State, from cooperation to tensions and conflict. All of them have distinct local inscriptions as well as transnational connections making them part of a global history of Feminism (Netsanet, 2022).
For this conference and the book that will follow, we want to pull together researches which, in drawing on existing literature and fresh empirical work, dig into women’s forms of engagement with gender relations of power, articulated with others such as, for instance, social class, ethnicity, age, or validity. These forms of engagement can be individual or collective, organized or unorganized, glaring or hidden, small-scale or up-scale; and range from hidden, small-scale or up-scale; and range from negotiation to confrontation.
About the Film Screening
The film is prepared by Dr.Netsanet G/Michael who did a pertinent archival and research work on Ethiopian students movement during the revolution and the screening is part of her archival documentary and it will be followed by debate among different women generations from the 60s and from the contemporary young Ethiopian women who are working on the advocacy.
REFERENCES : Women Everyday resistance and Activism in Ethiopia REFERENCES
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Secrétaire Scientifique (30 avril 2025). “Women Everyday resistance and Activism in Ethiopia” – CFEE x AAU x LoWoVo. UN ŒIL SUR LA CORNE / AN EYE ON THE HORN. Consulté le 18 mai 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13uj8