1 00:00:03,230 --> 00:00:08,050 OK. All right. OK, so welcome, everyone. Thank you. 2 00:00:08,050 --> 00:00:14,980 Thanks for joining our seminar series for today. To day, we are hosting Dr. Jennifer Regan. 3 00:00:14,980 --> 00:00:20,710 She's a professor of international studies at Acadia University in the US. 4 00:00:20,710 --> 00:00:25,300 She studies nationalism, the state, militarism and education. 5 00:00:25,300 --> 00:00:35,830 She's the author of The Struggling State Nationalism, Mass Militarisation and the Education of Eretria, in which was published in 2016. 6 00:00:35,830 --> 00:00:46,270 She has earned fellowships from the War Humanities Centre, the judge at Holt Programme, Fulbright Dispenser Foundation, 7 00:00:46,270 --> 00:00:53,600 National Academy of Education and the Social Science Research Council, along with Amanda Paul Call. 8 00:00:53,600 --> 00:01:02,800 She's the author of the hosting State and Its Restless Guests Time Making Mobility and Contentment Amongst Each Area Foodies in Ethiopia, 9 00:01:02,800 --> 00:01:05,260 which is currently under review. 10 00:01:05,260 --> 00:01:14,560 Today, she will be speaking to the theme of the intimate two teachers on plot lines between repression and revolution. 11 00:01:14,560 --> 00:01:17,230 So please join me in welcoming Dr. Reegan. 12 00:01:17,230 --> 00:01:31,020 Can I please ask everyone to turn off their cameras and microphones so that this can go their way and then we can talk about microphones and cameras. 13 00:01:31,020 --> 00:01:37,000 We want to ask questions after the end of our presentation. So, Dr. Rega. 14 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:41,050 Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. Nice to meet. 15 00:01:41,050 --> 00:01:47,470 Well, I, I, I would like to thank you for introducing her, inviting me to come speak to the seminar, 16 00:01:47,470 --> 00:01:53,290 and also for putting together the edited volume on ethnographies of the state in Africa, 17 00:01:53,290 --> 00:01:59,330 which led us to get to know each other and produce the paper for this particular volume. 18 00:01:59,330 --> 00:02:05,760 So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Hopefully that worked out the way it's supposed to be, 19 00:02:05,760 --> 00:02:10,560 I'm always a little bit disconcerted when everything jumps around as soon as you share your screen. 20 00:02:10,560 --> 00:02:14,640 But hopefully everyone can see everything that they're supposed to be seeing and not my notes. 21 00:02:14,640 --> 00:02:18,360 Is that right? Several years. Great. Sounds good. 22 00:02:18,360 --> 00:02:21,390 I've been really happy to engage with this project, 23 00:02:21,390 --> 00:02:28,170 which I've been working on concurrently with the other project that while I just mentioned on Eritrean refugees and in Ethiopia, 24 00:02:28,170 --> 00:02:34,980 in part because it's allowed me to revisit some older theoretical frameworks to help make sense of the state in Africa and elsewhere, 25 00:02:34,980 --> 00:02:37,710 which I think are still very relevant. 26 00:02:37,710 --> 00:02:45,900 When I began graduate school in the early 2000s, everyone was talking as if the nation state would immediately cease to exist everywhere in the world. 27 00:02:45,900 --> 00:02:52,530 That's a bit of an exaggeration. It certainly hasn't done so. And now it seems clear that it isn't going anywhere soon. 28 00:02:52,530 --> 00:02:57,120 But the nation state is changing and arguably has to adapt in order to coexist 29 00:02:57,120 --> 00:03:02,340 with an array of different emergent things that are happening around the world. 30 00:03:02,340 --> 00:03:09,180 And what I'm particularly interested in thinking about is how a nation state that that claims to be moving 31 00:03:09,180 --> 00:03:16,020 towards democratic development has to contend with rising authoritarianism or in the case of Ethiopia, 32 00:03:16,020 --> 00:03:23,670 stable authoritarianism, populism, as well as new configurations of people's identities and economic formulations. 33 00:03:23,670 --> 00:03:33,180 So this particular paper is an ethnography of civic and ethical education teachers in Ethiopia during Ethiopia's 2016 17 state of emergency. 34 00:03:33,180 --> 00:03:40,110 I'm going to begin with a brief anecdote. Need to figure out how I'd change my slides. 35 00:03:40,110 --> 00:03:44,520 I'm going to begin with a brief anecdote from some of my fieldwork on civics teachers 36 00:03:44,520 --> 00:03:48,240 that I think raises some really interesting questions for our examination of the state. 37 00:03:48,240 --> 00:03:55,140 And then I'll move on from there to provide some ethnographic, auto, ethnographic and theoretical perspectives to talk about why. 38 00:03:55,140 --> 00:04:00,450 I think looking at schools and teachers in times of crisis are an important way to examine the 39 00:04:00,450 --> 00:04:06,660 intimate interpersonal and often violent realms of the state by looking at states of emergency, 40 00:04:06,660 --> 00:04:12,960 intimacy and normalcy. And then I'll provide a little bit of an overview of Ethiopia's civic and ethical education 41 00:04:12,960 --> 00:04:19,170 curriculum and particularly argue that that it produced a desire for democracy and many Ethiopians, 42 00:04:19,170 --> 00:04:22,530 if not the actual practises of democracy. And from there, 43 00:04:22,530 --> 00:04:28,410 I'll turn into some of my ethnographic work and interviews to explore some of the ways in which teachers 44 00:04:28,410 --> 00:04:35,070 existed on the fault fault line and indeed constituted the fault line between repression and revolution. 45 00:04:35,070 --> 00:04:42,600 So just a break to begin with. The anecdote that occurred fairly early in the fieldwork that I was conducting in April 2017. 46 00:04:42,600 --> 00:04:49,500 I'd been conducting observations and interviews with civic and ethical education teachers in five schools in Addis Ababa, 47 00:04:49,500 --> 00:04:57,090 while the state of emergency at that time was still in effect. I observed a class taught by a dynamic secondary school teacher who I'll call Elsah. 48 00:04:57,090 --> 00:05:03,000 That's clearly not her name. She was teaching a class on the topic of the value of saving, 49 00:05:03,000 --> 00:05:08,430 which is one of the mandatory units in the secondary school, civic and ethical education curriculum. 50 00:05:08,430 --> 00:05:14,430 She was extremely energetic. The students were very engaged. They were listening attentively, responding to her questions. 51 00:05:14,430 --> 00:05:17,220 She had a great rapport with her students. She laughed in class. 52 00:05:17,220 --> 00:05:25,200 Often the students seemed ease in her class, at ease in her class as we walked back to the staff room after I'd done this observation of her classes. 53 00:05:25,200 --> 00:05:29,040 She commented to me rather offhandedly that she was sorry that she was a bit 54 00:05:29,040 --> 00:05:33,870 behind in teaching the curriculum because she had been in jail for four months. 55 00:05:33,870 --> 00:05:38,790 So she then proceeded to explain to me that just after the state of emergency was declared, 56 00:05:38,790 --> 00:05:43,170 one of her students in class had asked her why the government was arresting protesters. 57 00:05:43,170 --> 00:05:47,160 Given that, as they'd learnt in their civics class, it was their right to protest. 58 00:05:47,160 --> 00:05:51,900 The teacher had told the student that the student needed to distinguish between violent protests, 59 00:05:51,900 --> 00:05:56,790 which were not allowed by the government, and non-violent protests which which are allowed by the government. 60 00:05:56,790 --> 00:06:02,310 She said that shortly after that, two police officers came to the school and told her they wanted to ask her some questions. 61 00:06:02,310 --> 00:06:06,690 She was then subsequently arrested without trial and released four months later. 62 00:06:06,690 --> 00:06:12,150 She suspected later that some of her students had reported the classroom exchange and led to her arrest. 63 00:06:12,150 --> 00:06:18,270 So at first glance, this incident at ELSS arrest might look like a clear cut example of state repression, 64 00:06:18,270 --> 00:06:25,500 but it suggests that it's a good deal more complicated than that, and that this incident can teach us a great deal about how civics teachers not only 65 00:06:25,500 --> 00:06:29,370 navigate the shifting fault line between state repression and revolutionary change, 66 00:06:29,370 --> 00:06:32,220 but actually come to constitute that fault line. 67 00:06:32,220 --> 00:06:38,040 Going deeper into the nuances of this particular event and the teaching of civics during this time of turbulence in 68 00:06:38,040 --> 00:06:45,420 Ethiopia allows us to look much more closely at how the state comes to be and be thought of as a particular kind of thing, 69 00:06:45,420 --> 00:06:49,200 a time in a time of particular political transition in particular. 70 00:06:49,200 --> 00:06:53,370 So what I'm particularly interested in doing in this paper is exploring how an intimate, 71 00:06:53,370 --> 00:06:57,810 embodied, everyday experience of what we might think of as the state, 72 00:06:57,810 --> 00:07:03,280 particularly through a repressive state encounter, intersects with efforts of the state to legitimated. 73 00:07:03,280 --> 00:07:07,120 Self and results in the states failure to legitimate itself. 74 00:07:07,120 --> 00:07:12,250 Teachers can help us better understand the nature of the state, particularly these kinds of states and transitions, 75 00:07:12,250 --> 00:07:15,340 because teachers both constitute these encounters with the state, 76 00:07:15,340 --> 00:07:23,710 but are also charged with producing the idea of the state, a distinction that Philip Abrams made in his writing in the late 80s. 77 00:07:23,710 --> 00:07:30,010 Teachers are also often subject the sun is often the subjects of state discipline, which further complicates their issues. 78 00:07:30,010 --> 00:07:37,520 So I'll unravel some of these things as I work my way through the paper. 79 00:07:37,520 --> 00:07:40,210 Just trying to figure out. Turn page. All right. 80 00:07:40,210 --> 00:07:46,180 Just to start, is that what I have up here is just a very abbreviated history of political uprisings in Ethiopia. 81 00:07:46,180 --> 00:07:50,980 Mainly, I didn't know how familiar the audience, the audience would be with Ethiopia's political history. 82 00:07:50,980 --> 00:07:53,230 This is not intended to be comprehensive. 83 00:07:53,230 --> 00:08:02,390 It's really just intended to illustrate the number of different forms of political turbulence that Ethiopia has experienced over over the years. 84 00:08:02,390 --> 00:08:05,560 It's a it's a state that's often regarded as a stable place. 85 00:08:05,560 --> 00:08:14,500 But if you sort of look at the broader sweep of its history, Ethiopia keeps returning to these periods of what I think of as authoritarian centralism. 86 00:08:14,500 --> 00:08:20,430 And then there's waves of protest trying to push back against that. And then it returns to the sort of authoritarian centralism. 87 00:08:20,430 --> 00:08:24,850 And I think one of the reasons why you keep seeing these sort of rotations is that Ethiopia is 88 00:08:24,850 --> 00:08:30,070 constantly sort of projecting itself as a place that is trying to progress in one way or another, 89 00:08:30,070 --> 00:08:39,640 whether that's through communist reforms in the 70s or democratic reforms in that in the tooth in the late 90s and early 2000s. 90 00:08:39,640 --> 00:08:43,420 But something keeps pulling it back to a more repressive state. 91 00:08:43,420 --> 00:08:53,530 So I think that's an important thing to think about with regard to Ethiopia as we as we move forward in this presentation thinking about this. 92 00:08:53,530 --> 00:09:02,140 So Elsah was arrested in a in a very particular political moment during which a great deal was in flux beginning in 2014. 93 00:09:02,140 --> 00:09:07,660 The areas bordering Addis Ababa in the Oromo ethnic state had been embroiled in recurrent protests, 94 00:09:07,660 --> 00:09:13,840 initially due to anger over a plan for the central government to expand Addis Ababa into the Oromo state. 95 00:09:13,840 --> 00:09:17,470 Protests gathered momentum and support throughout 2015, 96 00:09:17,470 --> 00:09:21,760 despite the fact that the government then cancelled the controversial Addis out of the master plan. 97 00:09:21,760 --> 00:09:29,260 That was the focus of the protests. Unrest continued, often targeting businesses, particularly foreign owned businesses, throughout the state. 98 00:09:29,260 --> 00:09:35,950 At this tense and uncertain moment, I arrived in Addis Ababa for a yearlong fellowship with two small children and my husband, 99 00:09:35,950 --> 00:09:40,060 who happens to be an Eritrean who had grown up in Addis Ababa but had not been back 100 00:09:40,060 --> 00:09:45,680 to the city since his family was deported during the border war with Eritrea. That began in 1998. 101 00:09:45,680 --> 00:09:52,210 At this time, we were receiving lots of vague U.S. State Department warnings that told us to exercise caution, avoid large gatherings, 102 00:09:52,210 --> 00:09:55,180 not travel outside of Addis Ababa by road, 103 00:09:55,180 --> 00:10:01,440 which would require crossing immediately into the Oromo state because Addis Ababa is in fact surrounded by the Oromo state. 104 00:10:01,440 --> 00:10:05,280 I was have about this time came to feel like an island under siege. 105 00:10:05,280 --> 00:10:13,600 Protests and unrest surrounded the city and many people in Addis Ababa worried that they would pose a different danger to the city, 106 00:10:13,600 --> 00:10:16,840 although they did never really fully did. 107 00:10:16,840 --> 00:10:23,000 Ethiopians, as I noted on the earlier slide, have lived through many waves of political turbulence and state violence. 108 00:10:23,000 --> 00:10:28,960 Addis Ababa residents in their 40s and older will remember student movements that led to the transition from imperial rule 109 00:10:28,960 --> 00:10:36,670 under highly Selassie to communist rule and also the night the red terror that follow as Mengistu solidified his power, 110 00:10:36,670 --> 00:10:42,250 killed and imprisoned, terrorised and tortured not only other communist factions but civilians as well. 111 00:10:42,250 --> 00:10:47,380 Most Ethiopians had lived through the 1991 transition from the communist Derg regime under 112 00:10:47,380 --> 00:10:51,790 Miggins de Hailemariam to the Eritrean Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, 113 00:10:51,790 --> 00:10:57,760 which ruled until Prime Minister of the Army Ahmed took over in 2018. 114 00:10:57,760 --> 00:11:03,400 In 2005, widespread protest and government crackdown on post-election protests occurred after 115 00:11:03,400 --> 00:11:07,540 the opposition and the government disagreed about who had won a majority of seats. 116 00:11:07,540 --> 00:11:13,150 And from that point on, the EPRI, RDF, for the most part, succeeded in increasing their hold on power. 117 00:11:13,150 --> 00:11:19,450 Backed away from democratic reforms until 2014, when the country began to erupt again. 118 00:11:19,450 --> 00:11:24,850 So that's when we sort of begin this moment of the state of emergency that I began writing about during 119 00:11:24,850 --> 00:11:30,430 conversations with Ethiopian colleagues at Addis Ababa University during the state of emergency and just before it, 120 00:11:30,430 --> 00:11:38,470 as well as my middle class neighbours and friends during the fall of 2016, the desire for a return to some version of normal, 121 00:11:38,470 --> 00:11:43,030 even if that normal was decidedly non-democratic and authoritarian, was palpable. 122 00:11:43,030 --> 00:11:49,270 Normal meant stable, predictable, a world in which one could go about one's ordinary duties conduct business. 123 00:11:49,270 --> 00:11:54,550 At the same time, there was almost no support for the government, and there was a great deal of concern about corruption, 124 00:11:54,550 --> 00:12:00,130 youth unemployment and increasingly an increasingly strong arm tactics to squash protests and shut 125 00:12:00,130 --> 00:12:06,310 down even moderate opposition political opposition voices in the middle of this volatile politics. 126 00:12:06,310 --> 00:12:12,690 There wasn't, except there was an expectation that things would and should always return to some kind of imagined normal. 127 00:12:12,690 --> 00:12:17,260 So ongoing state repression and the sort of desire to return to normal, even if normal, 128 00:12:17,260 --> 00:12:23,230 didn't mean a move towards democracy seemed to the intention and intention with each other. 129 00:12:23,230 --> 00:12:27,910 On October 2nd, 2016, tensions came to a head around the annual Oromo or Reach, 130 00:12:27,910 --> 00:12:33,150 a festival which is celebrated in the town of Boshoff to 40 kilometres outside about a Sabata. 131 00:12:33,150 --> 00:12:36,470 The rage is the most important Oromos celebration and just. 132 00:12:36,470 --> 00:12:41,330 To summarise what happened. By all accounts, the government took over the celebrations, 133 00:12:41,330 --> 00:12:46,610 which should have been both a religious and a political celebration for the Oromo people themselves. 134 00:12:46,610 --> 00:12:54,620 This led to great frustration and eventually the crowd shouting out anti-government slogans to which there was a display of force by the government. 135 00:12:54,620 --> 00:12:59,630 Some some accounts suggest tear gas or rubber bullets, some some suggest live rounds. 136 00:12:59,630 --> 00:13:05,150 This then led to a panic, which led to a stampede which led to large numbers of people being crushed to death. 137 00:13:05,150 --> 00:13:11,740 And estimates range between 55 people who were killed and 700 people who were killed in this incident. 138 00:13:11,740 --> 00:13:16,820 Back in out of San Diego, where I was at the time, the story trickled to us in alarming bits and pieces. 139 00:13:16,820 --> 00:13:23,480 One rumour floated around that I think is particularly interesting that the government had used a military helicopter on site and had fired at people. 140 00:13:23,480 --> 00:13:27,110 We had a friend visiting us at that time, a person who, like my husband, 141 00:13:27,110 --> 00:13:32,150 had lived through the red terror, which was an extremely violent period of infighting. 142 00:13:32,150 --> 00:13:39,590 And when he heard about the use of a helicopter, he broke down and immediately began to feel unsafe, saying, I don't know where this is heading. 143 00:13:39,590 --> 00:13:41,300 Will we always be unsafe? 144 00:13:41,300 --> 00:13:47,810 What we later learnt as we talked to this friend of ours was that this recalled for him a time when the technical school where 145 00:13:47,810 --> 00:13:56,360 he attended school had had a military trained helicopter trained on the school in the face of a coup attempt at that time. 146 00:13:56,360 --> 00:14:02,570 So in some ways, I think it's we later learnt that the helicopter was supposedly dropping leaflets that read Happy Racha to the crowd, 147 00:14:02,570 --> 00:14:08,540 not firing on the crowd. But nevertheless, even though the helicopter was supposedly dropping leaflets, 148 00:14:08,540 --> 00:14:18,590 its presence was a powerful material and symbolic signifier of state repression that viscerally evoked feelings and embodied memories of fear, 149 00:14:18,590 --> 00:14:22,730 violence and uncertainty, which I think are very close to the surface to many Ethiopians. 150 00:14:22,730 --> 00:14:29,450 And I'll talk about that more in a little bit. So there was another week of intensified protests after that. 151 00:14:29,450 --> 00:14:30,870 And eventually on October eight, 152 00:14:30,870 --> 00:14:39,290 that six month state of emergency that eventually led to ELSS arrest was declared the state of emergency temporarily restored calm and normalcy, 153 00:14:39,290 --> 00:14:43,460 but also resulted in mass arrests, significant repression, the banning of terminologies, 154 00:14:43,460 --> 00:14:47,900 symbols, TV stations and publications associated with opposition groups, 155 00:14:47,900 --> 00:14:51,830 mobile internet access and access to social media was blocked throughout most 156 00:14:51,830 --> 00:14:55,820 of the country and sometimes the Internet as a whole outside of Addis Ababa, 157 00:14:55,820 --> 00:15:00,980 particularly in the Oromo state. The effects of increased state repression were felt strongly. 158 00:15:00,980 --> 00:15:05,780 But in Addis Ababa, we all quickly adapted to our lack of connectivity and almost immediately forgot 159 00:15:05,780 --> 00:15:09,860 the turbulent turbulence that had been so pervasive just a few months before. 160 00:15:09,860 --> 00:15:14,180 Fear and uncertainty followed by the ease with which the tension was forgotten and the pervasive, 161 00:15:14,180 --> 00:15:22,580 dire desire for a return to normal can be inconstant and encapsulated by a couple of theoretical terms that come from two different anthropologists. 162 00:15:22,580 --> 00:15:24,680 One, the idea of the maddening state, 163 00:15:24,680 --> 00:15:31,580 which is the late anthropologists begonia are at Chagas concept and the other Michael Tao Sig's notion of the nervous system. 164 00:15:31,580 --> 00:15:38,540 Both concepts refer to a powerful desire for normalcy that a race but coexists with and can mask violence. 165 00:15:38,540 --> 00:15:46,970 The maddening state refers to the maddening condition as our desires for a paternalistic state, a state that is thought to care for its subjects, 166 00:15:46,970 --> 00:15:50,780 even in the face of evidence of egregious state violence, 167 00:15:50,780 --> 00:15:56,780 coexists with awareness of state violence and an awareness that is often squashed in the short term memory. 168 00:15:56,780 --> 00:16:04,160 Once some semblance of normal returns. So the idea of the maddening state gets at this idea of the idea that we're constantly desiring, imagining, 169 00:16:04,160 --> 00:16:10,100 thinking, trying to return back to some sense of calm, some sense that the state is taking care of us. 170 00:16:10,100 --> 00:16:17,000 But we're also constantly plagued by these awarenesses that the state is violent and those things exist in a in a state that can literally drive you, 171 00:16:17,000 --> 00:16:24,170 drive you mad if you wrestle with it for for too long. The memories and experience of violence don't go away. 172 00:16:24,170 --> 00:16:29,600 But they're integrated into our individual nervous systems, into the collective social nervous system, as Toussant notes. 173 00:16:29,600 --> 00:16:33,230 I mean, tussocks concept of the nervous system is a is a bit different. 174 00:16:33,230 --> 00:16:37,460 It's it's a it's a way of getting at when you have a state that is pervasively violent. 175 00:16:37,460 --> 00:16:42,170 What does that do to the individual nervous system by putting you on edge all the time, 176 00:16:42,170 --> 00:16:48,110 as well as the kind of collective nervous system that creates both a need to return to normalcy, 177 00:16:48,110 --> 00:16:55,590 but also a sort of sense that everyone's kind of constantly on edge and that's that's actually very close to the surface and can return at any point. 178 00:16:55,590 --> 00:17:00,770 So we might argue that both the maddening state and the nervous system are manifestations 179 00:17:00,770 --> 00:17:04,760 of the discrepancy between what Philip Abrams refers to as the state idea. 180 00:17:04,760 --> 00:17:08,870 On one hand, the way we think of the state in a particular way, benevolent, 181 00:17:08,870 --> 00:17:15,320 paternalistic, everything's OK, normal, and what he calls the palpable nexus of praxis, 182 00:17:15,320 --> 00:17:22,100 which is actually our everyday encounters with the state, which might be violent, might be different, might be mundane or ordinary. 183 00:17:22,100 --> 00:17:28,550 But in the case of Ethiopia at this time, we're often, for many people, quite violent under conditions of state violence and authoritarianism, 184 00:17:28,550 --> 00:17:36,180 state ideas, particularly ideas that the state produces about itself, clash with state practise and Ethiopia. 185 00:17:36,180 --> 00:17:39,970 Theory in practise and state violence coexisted with claims that Ethiopia was democratic, 186 00:17:39,970 --> 00:17:42,880 and I'll get into this a little bit more when I talk about the civics curriculum, 187 00:17:42,880 --> 00:17:49,150 which really made people be able to think about Ethiopia as a democratic place even when it was not behaving as a democratic place. 188 00:17:49,150 --> 00:17:52,210 So my question moving forward is what happens to the government sanctioned and 189 00:17:52,210 --> 00:17:56,290 promoted discourses about the state as a liberal constitutional democracy? 190 00:17:56,290 --> 00:18:02,040 When these clashed with an increasingly intimate awareness of state violence and authoritarian practise. 191 00:18:02,040 --> 00:18:08,140 So I want to shift just slightly to talk a little bit more here about the productive effects of state violence. 192 00:18:08,140 --> 00:18:10,990 Violence is a challenge for thinking through subtleties of the state. 193 00:18:10,990 --> 00:18:17,080 It's very easy to just say that the state's use of violence to control and squashed dissent are just repressive. 194 00:18:17,080 --> 00:18:21,700 But I would argue that it's important to consider the more subtle effects of state violence. 195 00:18:21,700 --> 00:18:27,940 Violence always disciplines, produces and shapes a particular state subject relationship. 196 00:18:27,940 --> 00:18:36,520 Salwa Ismael's work on Syria coins the term pedagogical violence to talk about the ways in which extremes of Iren violence in Syria, 197 00:18:36,520 --> 00:18:40,870 where she's writing teach state subjects to live emits violence, 198 00:18:40,870 --> 00:18:48,160 but also teach subjects to develop particular subject relationship with the state in order to avoid violence, in order to cope with violence, 199 00:18:48,160 --> 00:18:52,330 in order to make sense of how to behave as state subjects in a way that's quite distinct from the way, 200 00:18:52,330 --> 00:18:57,520 say, Democratic state subjects would think about. In some ways, 201 00:18:57,520 --> 00:19:03,760 my my own work on on Eritrea that looks at the notion of the punishing state and the way people think about the state as a punishing entity. 202 00:19:03,760 --> 00:19:10,180 And then an intern experienced punishment again and again as a similar way of understanding the effects of state violence, 203 00:19:10,180 --> 00:19:18,250 state coercion, and the ways in which people come to think of themselves as subjects of a state that's capable of ongoing violence. 204 00:19:18,250 --> 00:19:26,380 So in the case of an ELSS arrest, she's in many ways subject to this kind of state violence. 205 00:19:26,380 --> 00:19:32,650 This kind of pedagogical violence. And I'll talk more in a few minutes about how it how it is that that affected 206 00:19:32,650 --> 00:19:37,540 the way she and other civics teacher thought about particular state violence. 207 00:19:37,540 --> 00:19:40,270 But she's also being asked to perform two contradictory roles. 208 00:19:40,270 --> 00:19:46,360 She's been asking to she's being asked by teaching the civics curriculum to promote the idea of a democratic state. 209 00:19:46,360 --> 00:19:51,270 And then she's also being asked to quell dissent amongst her students and certain kinds of ways. 210 00:19:51,270 --> 00:19:55,780 But she herself is then also a victim of state state repression. 211 00:19:55,780 --> 00:20:03,250 We might think of this contradiction as leading to a condition that A Shiel and then B refers to as impotence and mutual zombification, 212 00:20:03,250 --> 00:20:10,750 a condition that emerges when authoritarian rulers rely on their absolute capacity to command the bodies of the rules. 213 00:20:10,750 --> 00:20:15,430 The rule may have no choice but to comply. But rulers lose their buy in their trust. 214 00:20:15,430 --> 00:20:20,590 Achieving legitimacy is difficult, resulting in an impotent situation where neither reform, 215 00:20:20,590 --> 00:20:25,750 progress or opposition or or full control is entirely possible. 216 00:20:25,750 --> 00:20:30,670 So I wanted to flag that baize idea because I'll return to this idea to suggest ways in which the 217 00:20:30,670 --> 00:20:36,250 condition of civics teachers led to a kind of impotence where the state could not legitimate itself, 218 00:20:36,250 --> 00:20:41,080 either through a pretence of democracy or through convincing people to buy into 219 00:20:41,080 --> 00:20:47,110 their authoritarian practises or through allowing dissent to actually take place. 220 00:20:47,110 --> 00:20:53,440 So there's this impotent stalemate is something that I think we see Ethiopia and other places fall into repeatedly. 221 00:20:53,440 --> 00:20:55,330 So where are teachers in all this? 222 00:20:55,330 --> 00:21:02,620 To explore the multiple faceted role of teachers as constituting an intimate fault line between repression and revolutionary change, 223 00:21:02,620 --> 00:21:06,190 I think it's important to understand explore two things that I detailed above. 224 00:21:06,190 --> 00:21:12,550 One, the discrepancy between state idea and state practise and to the complex effects of state violence. 225 00:21:12,550 --> 00:21:20,500 So one thing that that Art Chaga tells us is that state violence brings the state close to the skin and intimate in a particular kind of way. 226 00:21:20,500 --> 00:21:22,720 But teachers also make the state intimate. 227 00:21:22,720 --> 00:21:28,870 And we don't often think of teachers as state actors, but they are in many places, especially places like Ethiopia. 228 00:21:28,870 --> 00:21:36,280 And two teachers tend to bring the state in in the sense that they're often physically, emotionally and psychologically close with their students. 229 00:21:36,280 --> 00:21:41,890 They're charged with nurturing young state subjects and socialising them into the ways of the nation. 230 00:21:41,890 --> 00:21:47,200 They act in the place of parents at times, sometimes forming a bridge between the family and the state. 231 00:21:47,200 --> 00:21:51,460 Teachers are responsible for intimately producing and reproducing the state, 232 00:21:51,460 --> 00:21:59,030 but this locates them in that gap between the discursive production of the state and encounters between the state and its people in everyday realm, 233 00:21:59,030 --> 00:22:05,410 their art. They also engage in a daily basis with what Michael Hertzfeld calls cultural intimacy, or a discursive, 234 00:22:05,410 --> 00:22:12,400 interactive process in which the state is not glorified, but rather the less savoury elements of national belonging are circulated. 235 00:22:12,400 --> 00:22:15,390 A scribe with meaning and made collective. 236 00:22:15,390 --> 00:22:24,030 So the state of emergency in Ethiopia was a complex time, a time in which a sense of fear and repression got close to the skin of state subjects, 237 00:22:24,030 --> 00:22:30,310 but which also kept open spaces for possibility and never fully abandoned the idea of democracy. 238 00:22:30,310 --> 00:22:36,020 One factor that made the idea of democracy possible was that it was the civic and ethical education curriculum. 239 00:22:36,020 --> 00:22:38,650 Made democracy imaginable in Ethiopia. 240 00:22:38,650 --> 00:22:44,800 This curriculum was put in place by the same government that then in turn seemed to be unravelling those possibilities. 241 00:22:44,800 --> 00:22:50,740 So now I'll turn to talking about a little bit of an overview of the Ethiopian civic and ethical education curriculum. 242 00:22:50,740 --> 00:22:57,400 And then I'll talk about my ethnographic data, which hopefully brings that more theoretical bit and the CEO curriculum together. 243 00:22:57,400 --> 00:23:03,580 So what I have here on the slide is the overview of the main topics in the civic and ethical education curriculum. 244 00:23:03,580 --> 00:23:09,120 These are topics that are repeated throughout high school and they give slightly different examples and exercises. 245 00:23:09,120 --> 00:23:12,520 But basically, these are the same topics that were set up in the curriculum. 246 00:23:12,520 --> 00:23:17,920 So first I note that that Elsah, despite being a target of state repression, 247 00:23:17,920 --> 00:23:22,480 according to her own account, was not being particularly revolutionary or rebellious. 248 00:23:22,480 --> 00:23:27,640 She was actually teaching directly from the government's civic and ethical education curriculum at the time of her, 249 00:23:27,640 --> 00:23:35,620 her arrest and indeed really following the book. Exactly. This curriculum might be thought of as a sort of instruction manual for how to 250 00:23:35,620 --> 00:23:40,480 be a good citizen who follows the Ethiopian constitution by Elsa's own account. 251 00:23:40,480 --> 00:23:44,800 She didn't silence the student. She didn't support the students challenging question. 252 00:23:44,800 --> 00:23:49,480 Instead, she tried to tactfully navigate a tricky and delicate situation. 253 00:23:49,480 --> 00:23:50,920 And she got arrested for it. 254 00:23:50,920 --> 00:23:57,950 So understanding a little bit more about the civic and ethical education curriculum might explain why she took this particular approach. 255 00:23:57,950 --> 00:24:04,540 Ethiopia see curriculum is largely responsible for educating Ethiopians about liberal democratic constitutional governance. 256 00:24:04,540 --> 00:24:11,220 Post nineteen ninety one, the EPR D.F., which I mentioned before, topower sort of by default 1991. 257 00:24:11,220 --> 00:24:16,480 But officially with the institution of democratic federalism in 1994 began a process of 258 00:24:16,480 --> 00:24:22,090 reframing the nation around the rights and autonomy of all ethnic groups and the rule of law, 259 00:24:22,090 --> 00:24:28,300 the c e curriculum as a blueprint for the EPR D. S initial vision of citizenship under the Constitution. 260 00:24:28,300 --> 00:24:32,710 It's importantly a required subject from elementary school through high school. 261 00:24:32,710 --> 00:24:37,960 It's also a very important subject in universities and people can study it in universities. 262 00:24:37,960 --> 00:24:40,000 Also, notably, university students were involved. 263 00:24:40,000 --> 00:24:46,900 University instructors, professors were involved in writing the curriculum, training students in the curriculum and revising the curriculum. 264 00:24:46,900 --> 00:24:53,110 So there was a lot of investment in the curriculum throughout the whole broad swath of the education system. 265 00:24:53,110 --> 00:24:58,480 It's a mandatory subject on university exams, meaning that students have to not only take the course, 266 00:24:58,480 --> 00:25:04,510 but they have to actually master the material if they wish to go to university. So there's a lot of weight put behind this. 267 00:25:04,510 --> 00:25:09,370 The curriculum outlines a particular notion of personhood that's oriented around democratic values, 268 00:25:09,370 --> 00:25:13,810 constitutionalism, federalism, multiculturalism and the rule of law. 269 00:25:13,810 --> 00:25:17,140 It educate students about human rights and democratic governance, 270 00:25:17,140 --> 00:25:22,240 and it promotes qualities of hard work, industriousness, peacebuilding and loyalty to the state. 271 00:25:22,240 --> 00:25:27,280 It places a great deal of emphasis on development and tolerance of diversity. 272 00:25:27,280 --> 00:25:30,160 The curricula has been revised three times. 273 00:25:30,160 --> 00:25:37,750 Some argued that it centres around three team themes constitutional democracy, which undergirds patriotism and government accountability, 274 00:25:37,750 --> 00:25:45,580 individual responsibility, which is linked with the idea of living in a multi-ethnic country and participating in an interdependent world. 275 00:25:45,580 --> 00:25:52,930 So we might think about these as three different forms of citizenship constitutional, multicultural and global and different ways. 276 00:25:52,930 --> 00:25:56,560 In the context of Ethiopia civic and ethical education curriculum, 277 00:25:56,560 --> 00:26:03,040 democracy refers to a collective understanding of one's duties as a constitutional and multicultural citizen. 278 00:26:03,040 --> 00:26:07,450 So the curriculum, in short, teaches people to adapt to new forms of citizenship that the EPR death was trying 279 00:26:07,450 --> 00:26:11,500 to put into place under the new constitution that introduced ethnic federalism, 280 00:26:11,500 --> 00:26:13,780 but also democratic reforms. 281 00:26:13,780 --> 00:26:21,550 So this is kind of a far cry from when when it rolled away from introducing democracy, that the curriculum stayed the same. 282 00:26:21,550 --> 00:26:28,540 At the time, my fieldwork, the civic and Ethical Education Curriculum, increasingly was sent centrally situated in debates about the plight of youth, 283 00:26:28,540 --> 00:26:35,410 economic and political marginalisation, the nature of citizenship and inclusive belonging for different groups, 284 00:26:35,410 --> 00:26:40,570 as well as the appropriate forms of civic protest. Civic participation, such as protest, 285 00:26:40,570 --> 00:26:46,870 ought to be noted that there was a lot of debate and criticism of the civics curriculum at that time around 2016 17. 286 00:26:46,870 --> 00:26:53,800 There still is. And just to give you a sense of some of the lines of debate and critique, some people, as I'll get into in a minute, 287 00:26:53,800 --> 00:26:58,150 were critical of the civics curriculum because they perceived that it was simply government propaganda and 288 00:26:58,150 --> 00:27:02,530 there was too much difference between the curriculum and the reality that the government was repressive. 289 00:27:02,530 --> 00:27:09,520 The curriculum promoted democracy and human rights. Another critique was that it was it was propaganda of the EPA, RDF, 290 00:27:09,520 --> 00:27:16,150 and evidence of this was that it took too critical a stance to earlier authoritarian leaders, 291 00:27:16,150 --> 00:27:20,470 namely, people would cite that it depicted highly, highly Selassie as an authoritarian leader. 292 00:27:20,470 --> 00:27:24,280 It depicted on the guest highly Marijan, the communist leader, as an authoritarian leader. 293 00:27:24,280 --> 00:27:30,910 And people thought it was too critical on those leaders without being equally critical of the current the current leadership. 294 00:27:30,910 --> 00:27:35,690 Other critiques were that it was promoting sort of an unruly generation of. 295 00:27:35,690 --> 00:27:41,300 Youth by promoting rights more than it was promoting obligations and duties. 296 00:27:41,300 --> 00:27:42,830 Some argued that it was too simple, 297 00:27:42,830 --> 00:27:49,070 that it needed to have a more complex curriculum and that earlier versions of the curriculum had been more complex, 298 00:27:49,070 --> 00:27:53,990 involve more reading, and the newer ones were kind of dumbed down in various different ways. 299 00:27:53,990 --> 00:27:57,230 So this is the nature of these these critiques. But in general, 300 00:27:57,230 --> 00:28:01,970 there was a sense that the curriculum had failed and that's why there was so much dissent 301 00:28:01,970 --> 00:28:14,500 in Ethiopia and so many youth uprisings at the time of the state of emergency was called. 302 00:28:14,500 --> 00:28:20,970 Surveillant backwards. All right. 303 00:28:20,970 --> 00:28:21,330 All right. 304 00:28:21,330 --> 00:28:30,150 So now shifting into some of my my ethnographic data to get a sense of what some of the teachers were struggling with regard to the civics curriculum. 305 00:28:30,150 --> 00:28:36,660 It's important to note that most when most of the civic and other ethical education core curriculum teachers were trained first, 306 00:28:36,660 --> 00:28:41,390 there was a lot of investment in their training and they were actually quite well-trained in their subject matter. 307 00:28:41,390 --> 00:28:46,770 And they were also tremendously excited, at least initially, and dedicated to the teaching of the subject. 308 00:28:46,770 --> 00:28:53,370 They thought of themselves and of civic, civic and ethical education as not political, as sort of apolitical. 309 00:28:53,370 --> 00:28:55,890 But they also thought of themselves as missionaries. 310 00:28:55,890 --> 00:29:01,690 So they said things like, we think of ourselves not they think we're political missionaries, but we think we're citizenship missionaries. 311 00:29:01,690 --> 00:29:06,900 So there's a strong sense of mission in their work. But this was not political work. 312 00:29:06,900 --> 00:29:12,030 One teacher even said repeatedly that their work and the curriculum should be regarded as secular 313 00:29:12,030 --> 00:29:17,070 and secular to him meant that they shouldn't be attached to a particular party or political group, 314 00:29:17,070 --> 00:29:24,420 but rather that they were sort of neutrally transcending partisan politics and teaching the concepts and ideas that would make Democratic work, 315 00:29:24,420 --> 00:29:31,830 which was really interesting that that was thought of as a more technical process and not a not a political not a political process. 316 00:29:31,830 --> 00:29:39,780 At the same time, C teachers knew they were commonly labelled as political teachers by teachers and other students, by other teachers and students. 317 00:29:39,780 --> 00:29:44,460 Most of the teachers were attracted because they genuinely liked and cared about the subject. 318 00:29:44,460 --> 00:29:48,900 But they kept saying things like, as you can see on the sly, on the quotations I have on my slide. 319 00:29:48,900 --> 00:29:55,290 Other teachers perceive us as instruments of the government. We're perceived as political missionaries, but we're citizenship missionaries. 320 00:29:55,290 --> 00:29:59,940 So this set of ideas kept coming up over and over and over again. But for teachers, 321 00:29:59,940 --> 00:30:07,680 their work was really about producing citizens who had knowledge and knew how to act as citizens of a country according to the Constitution. 322 00:30:07,680 --> 00:30:11,580 This shows an interesting kind of anti politics in the way teachers thought about their world, 323 00:30:11,580 --> 00:30:19,140 their work to sort of borrow loosely from James Ferguson's ideas about sort of development as an anti political anti politics machine. 324 00:30:19,140 --> 00:30:22,080 Teaching citizenship was thought of as a sort of technical project of sorts. 325 00:30:22,080 --> 00:30:25,770 If you know the curriculum, if you have a good curriculum, if you have a good teaching method, 326 00:30:25,770 --> 00:30:35,640 you can build Democratic citizens in some ways not so much a process of teaching students to engage in political dissent. 327 00:30:35,640 --> 00:30:41,760 If you knew how to teach and if you gave students the correct, ethical and moral and behaviour to be a citizen, 328 00:30:41,760 --> 00:30:49,740 you should ideally have a better outcome for your government. But the anti political technical work of citizen building became political because the 329 00:30:49,740 --> 00:30:54,180 government itself turned against its own state ideas that they had put into place. 330 00:30:54,180 --> 00:30:58,830 At the same time, as the quotes on the screen show, teachers were thought of as doing political work. 331 00:30:58,830 --> 00:31:03,210 So they were already sent, kind of caught between a rock and a hard place where everyone thought they were political. 332 00:31:03,210 --> 00:31:08,820 They thought they were disseminating government propaganda and being set up intentionally to do that. 333 00:31:08,820 --> 00:31:18,220 But teachers themselves said, no, we're just trying to sort of engage in this in this more technical process of creating good, good democracy. 334 00:31:18,220 --> 00:31:21,300 One of the key things that I wanted to flag is that one teacher expl. 335 00:31:21,300 --> 00:31:28,070 Actually, several teachers explained that things were different before 2005, 2005, 1997. 336 00:31:28,070 --> 00:31:31,650 And the Ethiopian calendar was a year when up until that point, 337 00:31:31,650 --> 00:31:35,910 people had a lot of faith in democracy and that the country was moving in a democratic direction. 338 00:31:35,910 --> 00:31:40,230 Parliamentary elections that year, there was a great dispute about who had won the parliamentary elections, 339 00:31:40,230 --> 00:31:44,970 leading to mass street protests and a massive government clampdown at that point, 340 00:31:44,970 --> 00:31:50,370 which moved the march towards authoritarianism and government repression never came back after that point. 341 00:31:50,370 --> 00:32:03,090 So between 2005 and 2014 and the protests that led up to the state of emergency, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for whites for widespread protests. 342 00:32:03,090 --> 00:32:07,290 So that was sort of seen as civic education was good before that particular moment. 343 00:32:07,290 --> 00:32:15,270 And then after that particular moment, it didn't work anymore. Other comments suggested that students laughed at the curriculum because they could see 344 00:32:15,270 --> 00:32:19,440 observed corruption and observed that the things that they were learning about weren't true. 345 00:32:19,440 --> 00:32:22,440 They said that initially the curriculum was good, it had credibility, 346 00:32:22,440 --> 00:32:27,180 but then it lost its credibility in the face of things going a different direction. 347 00:32:27,180 --> 00:32:32,520 So it's striking that teachers were trained and charged with the idea of promoting the idea of the 348 00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:38,490 state that was purveyed by the curriculum and idea oriented around citizenship and democracy. 349 00:32:38,490 --> 00:32:45,480 But that their work was equated as propaganda that was trying to hide the realities of what the state had actually become. 350 00:32:45,480 --> 00:32:50,580 So it's an interesting it's an interesting dilemma, despite the fact that teachers themselves really didn't see themselves as promoting 351 00:32:50,580 --> 00:32:56,880 these these values in the face of a place where that was no longer possible to do that. 352 00:32:56,880 --> 00:33:02,130 A couple of quick examples to to show sort of how this played out on the next two slides. 353 00:33:02,130 --> 00:33:07,750 I have quotations from the civics curriculum on one side of the slide in quotations from civics curriculum, 354 00:33:07,750 --> 00:33:15,720 civics teachers talking about how the reality and what the curriculum said were different in order to get a sense of what's going on here. 355 00:33:15,720 --> 00:33:20,910 So the curriculum in Unit one of the great elevon curriculum in. Plays out in a lot of different units of the curriculum. 356 00:33:20,910 --> 00:33:28,170 There's a lot of emphasis on on transparency. Students are given are quoted from the Constitution about transparency. 357 00:33:28,170 --> 00:33:34,260 There's a lot of explanation of what transparency is there, even given an assignment. 358 00:33:34,260 --> 00:33:39,660 A group work assignment where they're supposed to figure out how to tell how transparent their own school is. 359 00:33:39,660 --> 00:33:47,640 So clearly, the curriculum itself is trying to encourage students to be Democratic citizens who know how to demand government transparency. 360 00:33:47,640 --> 00:33:53,250 And then the teacher comments that we teach them about accountability and transparency. 361 00:33:53,250 --> 00:33:59,220 But then they see leaders abusing their power and they basically saying they know that if they challenge someone's in power, 362 00:33:59,220 --> 00:34:02,400 they're going to be hunted down and go to prison. And it's going to lead to problems for them. 363 00:34:02,400 --> 00:34:09,510 So the reality and what students actually see in practise is really nowhere close to each other. 364 00:34:09,510 --> 00:34:18,910 Similarly and importantly for it, for our subject matter, the same thing plays out around the idea of street of street protests. 365 00:34:18,910 --> 00:34:27,190 So, again, in one of the units from the great elevon curriculum, the idea of whether students should protest or not was hotly debated. 366 00:34:27,190 --> 00:34:30,340 This is the debate that got that got Elsah arrested. 367 00:34:30,340 --> 00:34:35,770 The curriculum notes that students have the right to protest and goes through a fairly extensive case study 368 00:34:35,770 --> 00:34:42,160 about how a group of students staged a demonstration in Addis Ababa against female genital mutilation. 369 00:34:42,160 --> 00:34:48,790 They get permission for it. They attract lots of people and they get the attention of their government officials and changes made. 370 00:34:48,790 --> 00:34:56,920 And, yeah, it's it's a good success story. However, the reality is that that not only can students not stage protests, 371 00:34:56,920 --> 00:35:06,160 but if teachers attempt to discuss with students the correct conditions in the correct ways to to stage a protest, 372 00:35:06,160 --> 00:35:09,730 then students like Elsah teachers like Elsa can be arrested. 373 00:35:09,730 --> 00:35:15,430 So teachers are very, very aware of the fact that despite the fact that students have the constitutional right to protest, 374 00:35:15,430 --> 00:35:22,750 they everyone knows that if you oppose the government, if you criticise them seriously, that there will be problems and that will not go well for you. 375 00:35:22,750 --> 00:35:31,180 So this the same kind of distinction between what the text not only says, but engages students in activities, 376 00:35:31,180 --> 00:35:36,910 interactive group sessions to try to learn how to do like state protests and hold 377 00:35:36,910 --> 00:35:45,000 institutions accountable is completely belied by what their actual experience in in life is. 378 00:35:45,000 --> 00:35:46,780 So speaking of education teachers, 379 00:35:46,780 --> 00:35:54,220 despite the fact that they believed in what the curriculum was saying about the method and a lot of cases as well as in the content of it, 380 00:35:54,220 --> 00:35:58,160 they were very wary of realising a politically mobilised teachers. 381 00:35:58,160 --> 00:36:01,720 Yes. And yet they had this text that they had to teach. 382 00:36:01,720 --> 00:36:03,940 So there was they were stuck in a few different ways between the text, 383 00:36:03,940 --> 00:36:11,410 between the reality and as we'll see in a minute, between what the students were actually demanding and asking for. 384 00:36:11,410 --> 00:36:19,240 So teachers, technocratic and anti political stance also extended towards their stance, towards their students in an interesting way. 385 00:36:19,240 --> 00:36:24,940 So another paradox that we see in teachers in the teaching of civics is that all they believe, 386 00:36:24,940 --> 00:36:29,470 although they believe deeply and teaching students about their democratic constitutional human rights, 387 00:36:29,470 --> 00:36:35,170 they're worried that students were too fixated on their rights and not considering their responsibilities enough. 388 00:36:35,170 --> 00:36:40,230 So when I when I asked them about this, this was something I heard from from teachers a lot, but also from people in Ethiopia. 389 00:36:40,230 --> 00:36:44,380 More and more generally, the young generation is more concerned about their rights, not the rest responsibilities. 390 00:36:44,380 --> 00:36:50,680 So when I asked teachers what this meant to be concerned about their responsibilities, they would say things like they should wear their uniforms, 391 00:36:50,680 --> 00:36:55,900 they should cover their exercise books, they should take care of the schools, they should follow the school rules. 392 00:36:55,900 --> 00:37:01,180 So I found this very curious that that duties were all about taking care of 393 00:37:01,180 --> 00:37:07,330 your school and rights were potentially sort of something something bigger, 394 00:37:07,330 --> 00:37:14,050 something about students sort of feeling the need to march in the streets and potentially potentially protest. 395 00:37:14,050 --> 00:37:16,210 So there's a sort of depoliticising in all of this also, 396 00:37:16,210 --> 00:37:20,500 but also a sense that teachers are thinking about if students learn how to take care of their school, 397 00:37:20,500 --> 00:37:22,900 if they learn discipline at the school level, 398 00:37:22,900 --> 00:37:28,600 they will be more disciplined when they grow up and go off into the world and take on bigger political roles. 399 00:37:28,600 --> 00:37:35,770 There was a very strong sense that it was a staged approach approach where students now needed to work hard and learn and learn as much as they could, 400 00:37:35,770 --> 00:37:41,230 and they somehow didn't have the maturity to be able to take on larger political roles now. 401 00:37:41,230 --> 00:37:46,120 So I think there's concern about students being overly political, 402 00:37:46,120 --> 00:37:53,110 was partly born from some cultural elements that suggest that young people should be respectful and different to old people, 403 00:37:53,110 --> 00:37:57,640 partly borne by some sort of more generalised concerns about restive youth marching in the street, 404 00:37:57,640 --> 00:38:04,380 which in many countries have been talked about as potentially problematic and unsettled. 405 00:38:04,380 --> 00:38:08,620 But I think it also kind of gets back to some in some way to this idea for normalcy. 406 00:38:08,620 --> 00:38:14,560 Again, recalling the idea of the maddening state. Right, that let's just get back to normal. 407 00:38:14,560 --> 00:38:21,580 Let's sort of figure out how to coexist with the government, whatever it will be, and not push back, not be not be restive. 408 00:38:21,580 --> 00:38:28,300 Let's get students acting like students instead of instead of pushing back against this. 409 00:38:28,300 --> 00:38:33,370 I think the anti political machinery going on here with teachers attitudes towards students, 410 00:38:33,370 --> 00:38:37,480 I think also gets gets back at Atman and Bambis idea of impotence, 411 00:38:37,480 --> 00:38:45,760 where teachers, when they're as they're stuck between the sort of rock and a hard place that they're also trying to socialise their students into. 412 00:38:45,760 --> 00:38:50,020 Just sort of just do your thing. Just be a good student. Don't make waves. 413 00:38:50,020 --> 00:38:56,890 It's not going to do you any any good in some ways. So it's not the politically empowering thing that the curriculum has the potential to be. 414 00:38:56,890 --> 00:39:00,820 Instead, it becomes the sort of politically disempowering or apolitical thing. 415 00:39:00,820 --> 00:39:05,140 So when we what do we do at this late arrest, Etzel elses arrest, start to mix a lot, 416 00:39:05,140 --> 00:39:10,740 make a little bit more sense by even addressing or engaging in a discussion with students about protests, 417 00:39:10,740 --> 00:39:13,020 she's stepping away from her technocratic role. Right. 418 00:39:13,020 --> 00:39:18,040 So she's expected to just kind of tell students, be a good student study as soon as she's even answered their question. 419 00:39:18,040 --> 00:39:25,600 She's already being too political in some ways, which may be one of the reasons why she was particularly vulnerable to to 420 00:39:25,600 --> 00:39:29,770 being arrested because she she didn't depoliticise completely in that moment. 421 00:39:29,770 --> 00:39:38,050 She instead engaged in some kind of political question, even if it was to say, here's why this is happening. 422 00:39:38,050 --> 00:39:45,130 So a final interesting element that came out in conversations with civics teacher was the idea that the students don't have fear, 423 00:39:45,130 --> 00:39:51,400 but the teachers are afraid. So I've already pointed out that teachers are an extremely difficult position. 424 00:39:51,400 --> 00:39:53,140 They're caught between the ideals of the curriculum. 425 00:39:53,140 --> 00:39:58,570 They believe in repression of the state, which they don't like, but they sort of make their peace with in some ways, 426 00:39:58,570 --> 00:40:04,870 a sense that the state was surveilling them, which made them feel like they had to walk, tread very, very carefully. 427 00:40:04,870 --> 00:40:07,780 And then the final thing that was challenging them was students challenging them 428 00:40:07,780 --> 00:40:13,420 themselves because students were not taking on this this apolitical role in the same way. 429 00:40:13,420 --> 00:40:17,830 So teachers had a sense of duty to ideals and a sense that they didn't really 430 00:40:17,830 --> 00:40:20,950 want to be doing political work because they were citizenship missionaries, 431 00:40:20,950 --> 00:40:25,870 not political missionaries, but students were constantly pushing, pushing back on them. 432 00:40:25,870 --> 00:40:31,210 And it's an interesting question to think about. Why were students afraid and teachers were not afraid? 433 00:40:31,210 --> 00:40:36,330 And I want to bring back in here so as Miles idea about pedagogical violence. 434 00:40:36,330 --> 00:40:36,820 And in a minute, 435 00:40:36,820 --> 00:40:45,100 I'll suggest that there was something of a generational effect going on here where teachers had had more historical and lived memory of 436 00:40:45,100 --> 00:40:53,770 earlier forms of political violence that made them more wary of engaging them than students might have been in in some in some ways. 437 00:40:53,770 --> 00:40:57,580 So teachers remembered, as it suggested in the first quotation I have here, 438 00:40:57,580 --> 00:41:03,790 that other teachers had faced consequences because they took the curriculum too far, 439 00:41:03,790 --> 00:41:09,070 politicised it too much, or pushback against the pushback against the government. 440 00:41:09,070 --> 00:41:16,480 So, for example, it's not one teacher said, as as I note here, that this teacher raised this consciousness of the students and they took his job away. 441 00:41:16,480 --> 00:41:21,130 Other teachers had pay docked. Other teachers were coerced into joining the party. 442 00:41:21,130 --> 00:41:29,930 And then, of course, we have an example of at least one teacher being arrested and I believe other teachers at this time were arrested as well. 443 00:41:29,930 --> 00:41:36,730 The second quotation gets it, the idea that that teachers see students challenges as as risky. 444 00:41:36,730 --> 00:41:45,310 So when students ask teachers to answer questions and to answer this question about life, why is this not happening in reality? 445 00:41:45,310 --> 00:41:52,240 Teachers feel challenged by that. Teachers feel like they're potentially afraid, afraid of that. 446 00:41:52,240 --> 00:41:55,330 So I think that's that's an important thing thing to think about. 447 00:41:55,330 --> 00:42:02,350 Another quote that I didn't put up here also makes a really, really interesting point that that students see what's going on. 448 00:42:02,350 --> 00:42:07,780 They see the reality. They want to talk about it. And then students in turn turn around and speak freely, 449 00:42:07,780 --> 00:42:14,290 but that teachers won't speak freely because they've been one teacher even said teachers have been in prison during the previous regimes. 450 00:42:14,290 --> 00:42:23,500 So teachers are calling on an earlier historical memory, the fact that state violence is still very close to the skin for them. 451 00:42:23,500 --> 00:42:30,100 The nervous system, again, is sort of infused within them. I mean, they're very worried at this moment when they see the state behaving in this way. 452 00:42:30,100 --> 00:42:36,670 They're very worried in this moment of taking too much, taking too much of a risk. 453 00:42:36,670 --> 00:42:44,050 So I suggest that there's a generational effect on students lack of fear. And teachers fear the pedagogies of state violence and repression. 454 00:42:44,050 --> 00:42:51,430 Clearly affected students and teachers in very different ways, making teachers cautious and students in some ways bold. 455 00:42:51,430 --> 00:42:55,900 And it has to do with memory as well as the fact that teachers felt like they were they were in danger. 456 00:42:55,900 --> 00:43:02,700 All their students were in danger from this as well. But teachers were very much affected by a sort of nervous condition in some ways. 457 00:43:02,700 --> 00:43:07,300 And the final quotation I have appears a little bit different. And I think a little bit more complex. 458 00:43:07,300 --> 00:43:09,700 This particular teacher began by talking about students. 459 00:43:09,700 --> 00:43:16,780 Their students don't have a fear of teaching openly, but also talked about the way the teacher and the government feared each other. 460 00:43:16,780 --> 00:43:20,890 So this teacher says because of this, the government fears the teachers and the teachers fear the government. 461 00:43:20,890 --> 00:43:23,330 So teachers can challenge the government. 462 00:43:23,330 --> 00:43:28,960 So there's a sense that teachers are not, although they're saying we're doing we're citizenship missionaries and we're not political. 463 00:43:28,960 --> 00:43:35,530 There's also a sense that they have knowledge and that they know things that can be a challenge and a sense that the government's fearful of them. 464 00:43:35,530 --> 00:43:42,970 So I think it's it's useful to bring in them ideas, impotence back in here to think about how teachers are afraid of the government. 465 00:43:42,970 --> 00:43:49,180 Government is afraid of the teachers. And as a result, neither one is particularly doing anything to sort of move forward. 466 00:43:49,180 --> 00:43:54,250 The government's not able to do as good a job at repressing it. That's what it wants to do here. 467 00:43:54,250 --> 00:43:58,690 Teachers are not then doing as good a job at sort of moving into democratic citizenship 468 00:43:58,690 --> 00:44:05,710 and educating in those ways because everyone's hamstrung by their fear of of the other. 469 00:44:05,710 --> 00:44:13,540 So in conclusion, this idea of one of the toss out a couple of ideas, getting us back to the idea of repression and revolution, 470 00:44:13,540 --> 00:44:19,120 and can we get out of this cycle of impotence into something that looks transformative? 471 00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:24,970 So the idea of teachers not judging and just teaching, what is written in some ways is kind of the height of impotence, 472 00:44:24,970 --> 00:44:31,750 as was suggested in the last quotation, fearful of teaching curriculum and the interactive way it was written to be taught, 473 00:44:31,750 --> 00:44:37,870 teachers were unable to even produce what the texts that they were given, the curriculum that they were trained in, 474 00:44:37,870 --> 00:44:40,660 the curriculum that the government had designed for them to teach in order to 475 00:44:40,660 --> 00:44:44,230 support what the government initially said was its state building projects. 476 00:44:44,230 --> 00:44:47,920 So teachers are so impotent that they can't even teach the state building project 477 00:44:47,920 --> 00:44:51,280 that they're trained and charged with teaching that the government has invested in. 478 00:44:51,280 --> 00:44:56,620 So this teachers uncertain about how to do their job safely and the government without a way to 479 00:44:56,620 --> 00:45:01,780 legitimate disseminate or socialise students into the state building project that they're promoting. 480 00:45:01,780 --> 00:45:11,380 There are authoritarian regimes that do figure out ways to socialise state subjects into being dostal subjects of an authoritarian regime. 481 00:45:11,380 --> 00:45:13,690 Ethiopia hasn't particularly done that. 482 00:45:13,690 --> 00:45:20,020 So there's sort of cotton is kind of in between way where they have this text that socialises students into being Democratic citizens. 483 00:45:20,020 --> 00:45:24,100 And then that's not the way the states behaving. So there's this dumb disjuncture there. 484 00:45:24,100 --> 00:45:28,060 But teachers are also left with a sense of mission. They're aware of this paradox. 485 00:45:28,060 --> 00:45:33,940 They're aware of the importance of this condition of them that they're in with the government. 486 00:45:33,940 --> 00:45:38,450 And at least some of them still felt like they had a responsibility to push beyond it by not keeping silent. 487 00:45:38,450 --> 00:45:42,820 So I think the other quotation I have up there is also important, which is you have to keep struggling. 488 00:45:42,820 --> 00:45:44,230 You have to keep talking. 489 00:45:44,230 --> 00:45:50,560 I mean, I don't think this teacher here is talking about sort of sending students out to engage in street protests or leading the way. 490 00:45:50,560 --> 00:45:57,330 But instead of saying, let's just keep teaching our curriculum, let's keep let's keep going with what we're supposed to be doing. 491 00:45:57,330 --> 00:46:06,120 So I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't conclude this talk without sharing some of Elsas last words in the interview that I did with her. 492 00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:11,010 Despite her arrest, she said that she remains strong and even in the face of what had happened to her, 493 00:46:11,010 --> 00:46:15,690 she was determined to stay strong and offered a critique of what would have what should have happened, 494 00:46:15,690 --> 00:46:18,960 which is both mundane, I think, and revolutionary. 495 00:46:18,960 --> 00:46:26,790 I think it also provides an interesting and clear path out of some of the into impotence that probably came directly from her knowledge of civics. 496 00:46:26,790 --> 00:46:31,350 So here I asked her sort of what she was mentioning, gaps that exist in governance. 497 00:46:31,350 --> 00:46:35,370 And we might think of that as the gap between the state idea and state in practise. 498 00:46:35,370 --> 00:46:41,460 And she was very specific about it. She didn't say, I'll get rid of the government. We need to completely just shift everything around. 499 00:46:41,460 --> 00:46:45,930 What she said is that this was unnecessary interference and had a very pragmatic solution, she said. 500 00:46:45,930 --> 00:46:50,190 In my situation, this could have been addressed by the school. This was not the jurisdiction of the police. 501 00:46:50,190 --> 00:46:53,760 So effectively, she's saying, let's get the police out of the school. 502 00:46:53,760 --> 00:46:59,220 If I'm a bad teacher, if I do something I'm not supposed to do, my school director needs to handle that for me. 503 00:46:59,220 --> 00:47:02,340 She said if there's a complaint from a student, that's the purview of the school. 504 00:47:02,340 --> 00:47:05,850 So she's asking for something much more humble and modest in some way. 505 00:47:05,850 --> 00:47:12,180 She's asking for sort of clear delineations for different state actors to do their jobs differently. 506 00:47:12,180 --> 00:47:16,110 And she concludes saying, But. But I'm strong now. I'm even stronger than before. 507 00:47:16,110 --> 00:47:22,290 I'm a civics teacher, and it's my responsibility to talk about democracy. But when we talk about the reality, it's horrible. 508 00:47:22,290 --> 00:47:27,600 So in conclusion, she just to leave here her with your words, she's basically saying it's a good curriculum. 509 00:47:27,600 --> 00:47:31,560 Let me just continue to do my job and move on. All right. 510 00:47:31,560 --> 00:47:37,830 And I look forward to your questions. 511 00:47:37,830 --> 00:47:47,520 Thank you very much for that, Excelencia Genta. So to question us now. 512 00:47:47,520 --> 00:47:56,010 If you have questions and you might type your questions into the conversation box and then I might ask you to go on to 513 00:47:56,010 --> 00:48:03,000 ask the right people if you want to just raise your digital point and then they can call on you to ask your question. 514 00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:08,700 So if I can start Jennifer, I am. 515 00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:16,770 It's quite fascinating, the confluence between the idea of the state and state effect and then they took out context. 516 00:48:16,770 --> 00:48:20,680 So I was wondering what agents of the state how do you get. 517 00:48:20,680 --> 00:48:30,310 So the state defended this wide gulf between the critical elements of civic education and ascetic practises. 518 00:48:30,310 --> 00:48:39,450 The attempted defenders. So don't even bother to articulate any kind of defence of discourse between state parties and civic. 519 00:48:39,450 --> 00:48:46,320 What the core elements of civic education. You know, it's that's that's a really, really interesting question. 520 00:48:46,320 --> 00:48:51,750 So in the moment when I was doing this research. No, they were they were not defending it. 521 00:48:51,750 --> 00:48:54,480 They were either remaining completely silent about it. 522 00:48:54,480 --> 00:49:01,630 And there were civics teachers that I interviewed who just were were very, very sort of quiet about sort of just very factual. 523 00:49:01,630 --> 00:49:04,800 Here's what I teach. Here's what I do. And they wouldn't comment. 524 00:49:04,800 --> 00:49:09,240 And then there were others that were more willing to the open as the ones that I quoted were. 525 00:49:09,240 --> 00:49:13,920 But nobody tried to defend the gap and to say this is OK. 526 00:49:13,920 --> 00:49:18,900 It would be interesting to know and this would require a different kind of research. 527 00:49:18,900 --> 00:49:25,980 If in an earlier or different moment in history, say around 2005 or 2004, 528 00:49:25,980 --> 00:49:30,900 if at that point civics teachers were still trying to defend the defend the gap. 529 00:49:30,900 --> 00:49:36,510 But by 2016, when I was there, I don't think anyone was trying to say, here's how we can spend now. 530 00:49:36,510 --> 00:49:44,730 Having said that, I think when teachers say things like students can protest, but there needs to be procedures for it. 531 00:49:44,730 --> 00:49:46,890 I think that that's a way that you could defend that gap. 532 00:49:46,890 --> 00:49:52,200 You could sort of take a technocratic response and say, we need them to do this the right way. 533 00:49:52,200 --> 00:49:56,490 We need them to not just sort of go out and be angry. We need them to think in a more measured way. 534 00:49:56,490 --> 00:50:06,780 We need them to learn first. But I think the gap had become so wide that teachers didn't feel like there was that that was it was defensible anyway. 535 00:50:06,780 --> 00:50:09,250 The teacher who was probably doing her best. 536 00:50:09,250 --> 00:50:15,900 I mean, she was probably trying in some ways to defend that gap and say, look, these protesters are doing it the wrong way. 537 00:50:15,900 --> 00:50:20,430 They didn't get permission. They didn't go through proper procedures. They're being violent. 538 00:50:20,430 --> 00:50:27,510 So she was trying to defend that gap, but then she got arrested. So I think that there is a I think there was a sense I think there was a sense 539 00:50:27,510 --> 00:50:31,360 that teachers could defend the gap by just going back to the curriculum. 540 00:50:31,360 --> 00:50:35,070 But I think by this point, most of the teachers were not buying into that. 541 00:50:35,070 --> 00:50:39,620 They weren't buying into the to what the government was doing into the practise, for the most part. 542 00:50:39,620 --> 00:50:43,440 So it was a moment of too much extreme. Now, later on. 543 00:50:43,440 --> 00:50:47,220 It would be going back and looking at that question would be a really interesting 544 00:50:47,220 --> 00:50:52,200 thing to do now when they're in the process of revising the civics curriculum again. 545 00:50:52,200 --> 00:50:55,620 It'll be interesting to see how it plays out or to go back. 546 00:50:55,620 --> 00:51:03,100 And if people would talk about it to see if you could do some historical research about earlier time periods, about what it would look like. 547 00:51:03,100 --> 00:51:06,570 There's very, very little research on the civics curriculum. 548 00:51:06,570 --> 00:51:11,480 So it's hard to sort of draw on a body of literature that sort of says here's how it was at other times. 549 00:51:11,480 --> 00:51:16,320 OK. Perhaps that would also include, you know, the new piece that we'll be examining. 550 00:51:16,320 --> 00:51:20,580 Also, the public discourse that's in the media about this, 551 00:51:20,580 --> 00:51:28,270 because it shown that a home being costeja about a geriatric Jameson Africa is a threat to the social order. 552 00:51:28,270 --> 00:51:31,950 And by and by now, I do have to point the talk was about teachers teaching. 553 00:51:31,950 --> 00:51:37,110 What do I not teach to teach night politics? Teach us actually paid to teach these things. 554 00:51:37,110 --> 00:51:44,710 But that story is not expected to practise what they have been taught, which is very interesting in terms of how, you know, 555 00:51:44,710 --> 00:51:53,120 what's destructo public discourse on this dissonance between what people are supposed to know and what they're supposed to do about that knowledge. 556 00:51:53,120 --> 00:51:57,090 Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's that's in some ways an authoritarian states. 557 00:51:57,090 --> 00:52:03,750 That's the more common is that teachers get in trouble for teaching things that are too much of a stretch are outside of the curriculum. 558 00:52:03,750 --> 00:52:09,420 But this was actually in this case, they were teaching the curriculum and the curriculum itself was no longer acceptable, 559 00:52:09,420 --> 00:52:16,230 which made it made for a really interesting, interesting moment of kind of crisis or contradiction for the government. 560 00:52:16,230 --> 00:52:24,930 Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Jesse. Face as can hear me. 561 00:52:24,930 --> 00:52:35,072 Yes. Great. Jane, it's very nice to see you speak.