OK. All right. OK, so welcome, everyone. Thank you.
Thanks for joining our seminar series for today. To day, we are hosting Dr. Jennifer Regan.
She's a professor of international studies at Acadia University in the US.
She studies nationalism, the state, militarism and education.
She's the author of The Struggling State Nationalism, Mass Militarisation and the Education of Eretria, in which was published in 2016.
She has earned fellowships from the War Humanities Centre, the judge at Holt Programme, Fulbright Dispenser Foundation,
National Academy of Education and the Social Science Research Council, along with Amanda Paul Call.
She's the author of the hosting State and Its Restless Guests Time Making Mobility and Contentment Amongst Each Area Foodies in Ethiopia,
which is currently under review.
Today, she will be speaking to the theme of the intimate two teachers on plot lines between repression and revolution.
So please join me in welcoming Dr. Reegan.
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.
We want to ask questions after the end of our presentation. So, Dr. Rega.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. Nice to meet.
Well, I, I, I would like to thank you for introducing her, inviting me to come speak to the seminar,
and also for putting together the edited volume on ethnographies of the state in Africa,
which led us to get to know each other and produce the paper for this particular volume.
So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Hopefully that worked out the way it's supposed to be,
I'm always a little bit disconcerted when everything jumps around as soon as you share your screen.
But hopefully everyone can see everything that they're supposed to be seeing and not my notes.
Is that right? Several years. Great. Sounds good.
I've been really happy to engage with this project,
which I've been working on concurrently with the other project that while I just mentioned on Eritrean refugees and in Ethiopia,
in part because it's allowed me to revisit some older theoretical frameworks to help make sense of the state in Africa and elsewhere,
which I think are still very relevant.
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.
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.
But the nation state is changing and arguably has to adapt in order to coexist
with an array of different emergent things that are happening around the world.
And what I'm particularly interested in thinking about is how a nation state that that claims to be moving
towards democratic development has to contend with rising authoritarianism or in the case of Ethiopia,
stable authoritarianism, populism, as well as new configurations of people's identities and economic formulations.
So this particular paper is an ethnography of civic and ethical education teachers in Ethiopia during Ethiopia's 2016 17 state of emergency.
I'm going to begin with a brief anecdote. Need to figure out how I'd change my slides.
I'm going to begin with a brief anecdote from some of my fieldwork on civics teachers
that I think raises some really interesting questions for our examination of the state.
And then I'll move on from there to provide some ethnographic, auto, ethnographic and theoretical perspectives to talk about why.
I think looking at schools and teachers in times of crisis are an important way to examine the
intimate interpersonal and often violent realms of the state by looking at states of emergency,
intimacy and normalcy. And then I'll provide a little bit of an overview of Ethiopia's civic and ethical education
curriculum and particularly argue that that it produced a desire for democracy and many Ethiopians,
if not the actual practises of democracy. And from there,
I'll turn into some of my ethnographic work and interviews to explore some of the ways in which teachers
existed on the fault fault line and indeed constituted the fault line between repression and revolution.
So just a break to begin with. The anecdote that occurred fairly early in the fieldwork that I was conducting in April 2017.
I'd been conducting observations and interviews with civic and ethical education teachers in five schools in Addis Ababa,
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.
That's clearly not her name. She was teaching a class on the topic of the value of saving,
which is one of the mandatory units in the secondary school, civic and ethical education curriculum.
She was extremely energetic. The students were very engaged. They were listening attentively, responding to her questions.
She had a great rapport with her students. She laughed in class.
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.
She commented to me rather offhandedly that she was sorry that she was a bit
behind in teaching the curriculum because she had been in jail for four months.
So she then proceeded to explain to me that just after the state of emergency was declared,
one of her students in class had asked her why the government was arresting protesters.
Given that, as they'd learnt in their civics class, it was their right to protest.
The teacher had told the student that the student needed to distinguish between violent protests,
which were not allowed by the government, and non-violent protests which which are allowed by the government.
She said that shortly after that, two police officers came to the school and told her they wanted to ask her some questions.
She was then subsequently arrested without trial and released four months later.
She suspected later that some of her students had reported the classroom exchange and led to her arrest.
So at first glance, this incident at ELSS arrest might look like a clear cut example of state repression,
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
navigate the shifting fault line between state repression and revolutionary change,
but actually come to constitute that fault line.
Going deeper into the nuances of this particular event and the teaching of civics during this time of turbulence in
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,
a time in a time of particular political transition in particular.
So what I'm particularly interested in doing in this paper is exploring how an intimate,
embodied, everyday experience of what we might think of as the state,
particularly through a repressive state encounter, intersects with efforts of the state to legitimated.
Self and results in the states failure to legitimate itself.
Teachers can help us better understand the nature of the state, particularly these kinds of states and transitions,
because teachers both constitute these encounters with the state,
but are also charged with producing the idea of the state, a distinction that Philip Abrams made in his writing in the late 80s.
Teachers are also often subject the sun is often the subjects of state discipline, which further complicates their issues.
So I'll unravel some of these things as I work my way through the paper.
Just trying to figure out. Turn page. All right.
Just to start, is that what I have up here is just a very abbreviated history of political uprisings in Ethiopia.
Mainly, I didn't know how familiar the audience, the audience would be with Ethiopia's political history.
This is not intended to be comprehensive.
It's really just intended to illustrate the number of different forms of political turbulence that Ethiopia has experienced over over the years.
It's a it's a state that's often regarded as a stable place.
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.
And then there's waves of protest trying to push back against that. And then it returns to the sort of authoritarian centralism.
And I think one of the reasons why you keep seeing these sort of rotations is that Ethiopia is
constantly sort of projecting itself as a place that is trying to progress in one way or another,
whether that's through communist reforms in the 70s or democratic reforms in that in the tooth in the late 90s and early 2000s.
But something keeps pulling it back to a more repressive state.
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.
So Elsah was arrested in a in a very particular political moment during which a great deal was in flux beginning in 2014.
The areas bordering Addis Ababa in the Oromo ethnic state had been embroiled in recurrent protests,
initially due to anger over a plan for the central government to expand Addis Ababa into the Oromo state.
Protests gathered momentum and support throughout 2015,
despite the fact that the government then cancelled the controversial Addis out of the master plan.
That was the focus of the protests. Unrest continued, often targeting businesses, particularly foreign owned businesses, throughout the state.
At this tense and uncertain moment, I arrived in Addis Ababa for a yearlong fellowship with two small children and my husband,
who happens to be an Eritrean who had grown up in Addis Ababa but had not been back
to the city since his family was deported during the border war with Eritrea. That began in 1998.
At this time, we were receiving lots of vague U.S. State Department warnings that told us to exercise caution, avoid large gatherings,
not travel outside of Addis Ababa by road,
which would require crossing immediately into the Oromo state because Addis Ababa is in fact surrounded by the Oromo state.
I was have about this time came to feel like an island under siege.
Protests and unrest surrounded the city and many people in Addis Ababa worried that they would pose a different danger to the city,
although they did never really fully did.
Ethiopians, as I noted on the earlier slide, have lived through many waves of political turbulence and state violence.
Addis Ababa residents in their 40s and older will remember student movements that led to the transition from imperial rule
under highly Selassie to communist rule and also the night the red terror that follow as Mengistu solidified his power,
killed and imprisoned, terrorised and tortured not only other communist factions but civilians as well.
Most Ethiopians had lived through the 1991 transition from the communist Derg regime under
Miggins de Hailemariam to the Eritrean Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front,
which ruled until Prime Minister of the Army Ahmed took over in 2018.
In 2005, widespread protest and government crackdown on post-election protests occurred after
the opposition and the government disagreed about who had won a majority of seats.
And from that point on, the EPRI, RDF, for the most part, succeeded in increasing their hold on power.
Backed away from democratic reforms until 2014, when the country began to erupt again.
So that's when we sort of begin this moment of the state of emergency that I began writing about during
conversations with Ethiopian colleagues at Addis Ababa University during the state of emergency and just before it,
as well as my middle class neighbours and friends during the fall of 2016, the desire for a return to some version of normal,
even if that normal was decidedly non-democratic and authoritarian, was palpable.
Normal meant stable, predictable, a world in which one could go about one's ordinary duties conduct business.
At the same time, there was almost no support for the government, and there was a great deal of concern about corruption,
youth unemployment and increasingly an increasingly strong arm tactics to squash protests and shut
down even moderate opposition political opposition voices in the middle of this volatile politics.
There wasn't, except there was an expectation that things would and should always return to some kind of imagined normal.
So ongoing state repression and the sort of desire to return to normal, even if normal,
didn't mean a move towards democracy seemed to the intention and intention with each other.
On October 2nd, 2016, tensions came to a head around the annual Oromo or Reach,
a festival which is celebrated in the town of Boshoff to 40 kilometres outside about a Sabata.
The rage is the most important Oromos celebration and just.
To summarise what happened. By all accounts, the government took over the celebrations,
which should have been both a religious and a political celebration for the Oromo people themselves.
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.
Some some accounts suggest tear gas or rubber bullets, some some suggest live rounds.
This then led to a panic, which led to a stampede which led to large numbers of people being crushed to death.
And estimates range between 55 people who were killed and 700 people who were killed in this incident.
Back in out of San Diego, where I was at the time, the story trickled to us in alarming bits and pieces.
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.
We had a friend visiting us at that time, a person who, like my husband,
had lived through the red terror, which was an extremely violent period of infighting.
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.
Will we always be unsafe?
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
he attended school had had a military trained helicopter trained on the school in the face of a coup attempt at that time.
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,
not firing on the crowd. But nevertheless, even though the helicopter was supposedly dropping leaflets,
its presence was a powerful material and symbolic signifier of state repression that viscerally evoked feelings and embodied memories of fear,
violence and uncertainty, which I think are very close to the surface to many Ethiopians.
And I'll talk about that more in a little bit. So there was another week of intensified protests after that.
And eventually on October eight,
that six month state of emergency that eventually led to ELSS arrest was declared the state of emergency temporarily restored calm and normalcy,
but also resulted in mass arrests, significant repression, the banning of terminologies,
symbols, TV stations and publications associated with opposition groups,
mobile internet access and access to social media was blocked throughout most
of the country and sometimes the Internet as a whole outside of Addis Ababa,
particularly in the Oromo state. The effects of increased state repression were felt strongly.
But in Addis Ababa, we all quickly adapted to our lack of connectivity and almost immediately forgot
the turbulent turbulence that had been so pervasive just a few months before.
Fear and uncertainty followed by the ease with which the tension was forgotten and the pervasive,
dire desire for a return to normal can be inconstant and encapsulated by a couple of theoretical terms that come from two different anthropologists.
One, the idea of the maddening state,
which is the late anthropologists begonia are at Chagas concept and the other Michael Tao Sig's notion of the nervous system.
Both concepts refer to a powerful desire for normalcy that a race but coexists with and can mask violence.
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,
even in the face of evidence of egregious state violence,
coexists with awareness of state violence and an awareness that is often squashed in the short term memory.
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,
thinking, trying to return back to some sense of calm, some sense that the state is taking care of us.
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,
drive you mad if you wrestle with it for for too long. The memories and experience of violence don't go away.
But they're integrated into our individual nervous systems, into the collective social nervous system, as Toussant notes.
I mean, tussocks concept of the nervous system is a is a bit different.
It's it's a it's a way of getting at when you have a state that is pervasively violent.
What does that do to the individual nervous system by putting you on edge all the time,
as well as the kind of collective nervous system that creates both a need to return to normalcy,
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.
So we might argue that both the maddening state and the nervous system are manifestations
of the discrepancy between what Philip Abrams refers to as the state idea.
On one hand, the way we think of the state in a particular way, benevolent,
paternalistic, everything's OK, normal, and what he calls the palpable nexus of praxis,
which is actually our everyday encounters with the state, which might be violent, might be different, might be mundane or ordinary.
But in the case of Ethiopia at this time, we're often, for many people, quite violent under conditions of state violence and authoritarianism,
state ideas, particularly ideas that the state produces about itself, clash with state practise and Ethiopia.
Theory in practise and state violence coexisted with claims that Ethiopia was democratic,
and I'll get into this a little bit more when I talk about the civics curriculum,
which really made people be able to think about Ethiopia as a democratic place even when it was not behaving as a democratic place.
So my question moving forward is what happens to the government sanctioned and
promoted discourses about the state as a liberal constitutional democracy?
When these clashed with an increasingly intimate awareness of state violence and authoritarian practise.
So I want to shift just slightly to talk a little bit more here about the productive effects of state violence.
Violence is a challenge for thinking through subtleties of the state.
It's very easy to just say that the state's use of violence to control and squashed dissent are just repressive.
But I would argue that it's important to consider the more subtle effects of state violence.
Violence always disciplines, produces and shapes a particular state subject relationship.
Salwa Ismael's work on Syria coins the term pedagogical violence to talk about the ways in which extremes of Iren violence in Syria,
where she's writing teach state subjects to live emits violence,
but also teach subjects to develop particular subject relationship with the state in order to avoid violence, in order to cope with violence,
in order to make sense of how to behave as state subjects in a way that's quite distinct from the way,
say, Democratic state subjects would think about. In some ways,
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.
And then an intern experienced punishment again and again as a similar way of understanding the effects of state violence,
state coercion, and the ways in which people come to think of themselves as subjects of a state that's capable of ongoing violence.
So in the case of an ELSS arrest, she's in many ways subject to this kind of state violence.
This kind of pedagogical violence. And I'll talk more in a few minutes about how it how it is that that affected
the way she and other civics teacher thought about particular state violence.
But she's also being asked to perform two contradictory roles.
She's been asking to she's being asked by teaching the civics curriculum to promote the idea of a democratic state.
And then she's also being asked to quell dissent amongst her students and certain kinds of ways.
But she herself is then also a victim of state state repression.
We might think of this contradiction as leading to a condition that A Shiel and then B refers to as impotence and mutual zombification,
a condition that emerges when authoritarian rulers rely on their absolute capacity to command the bodies of the rules.
The rule may have no choice but to comply. But rulers lose their buy in their trust.
Achieving legitimacy is difficult, resulting in an impotent situation where neither reform,
progress or opposition or or full control is entirely possible.
So I wanted to flag that baize idea because I'll return to this idea to suggest ways in which the
condition of civics teachers led to a kind of impotence where the state could not legitimate itself,
either through a pretence of democracy or through convincing people to buy into
their authoritarian practises or through allowing dissent to actually take place.
So there's this impotent stalemate is something that I think we see Ethiopia and other places fall into repeatedly.
So where are teachers in all this?
To explore the multiple faceted role of teachers as constituting an intimate fault line between repression and revolutionary change,
I think it's important to understand explore two things that I detailed above.
One, the discrepancy between state idea and state practise and to the complex effects of state violence.
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.
But teachers also make the state intimate.
And we don't often think of teachers as state actors, but they are in many places, especially places like Ethiopia.
And two teachers tend to bring the state in in the sense that they're often physically, emotionally and psychologically close with their students.
They're charged with nurturing young state subjects and socialising them into the ways of the nation.
They act in the place of parents at times, sometimes forming a bridge between the family and the state.
Teachers are responsible for intimately producing and reproducing the state,
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,
their art. They also engage in a daily basis with what Michael Hertzfeld calls cultural intimacy, or a discursive,
interactive process in which the state is not glorified, but rather the less savoury elements of national belonging are circulated.
A scribe with meaning and made collective.
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,
but which also kept open spaces for possibility and never fully abandoned the idea of democracy.
One factor that made the idea of democracy possible was that it was the civic and ethical education curriculum.
Made democracy imaginable in Ethiopia.
This curriculum was put in place by the same government that then in turn seemed to be unravelling those possibilities.
So now I'll turn to talking about a little bit of an overview of the Ethiopian civic and ethical education curriculum.
And then I'll talk about my ethnographic data, which hopefully brings that more theoretical bit and the CEO curriculum together.
So what I have here on the slide is the overview of the main topics in the civic and ethical education curriculum.
These are topics that are repeated throughout high school and they give slightly different examples and exercises.
But basically, these are the same topics that were set up in the curriculum.
So first I note that that Elsah, despite being a target of state repression,
according to her own account, was not being particularly revolutionary or rebellious.
She was actually teaching directly from the government's civic and ethical education curriculum at the time of her,
her arrest and indeed really following the book. Exactly. This curriculum might be thought of as a sort of instruction manual for how to
be a good citizen who follows the Ethiopian constitution by Elsa's own account.
She didn't silence the student. She didn't support the students challenging question.
Instead, she tried to tactfully navigate a tricky and delicate situation.
And she got arrested for it.
So understanding a little bit more about the civic and ethical education curriculum might explain why she took this particular approach.
Ethiopia see curriculum is largely responsible for educating Ethiopians about liberal democratic constitutional governance.
Post nineteen ninety one, the EPR D.F., which I mentioned before, topower sort of by default 1991.
But officially with the institution of democratic federalism in 1994 began a process of
reframing the nation around the rights and autonomy of all ethnic groups and the rule of law,
the c e curriculum as a blueprint for the EPR D. S initial vision of citizenship under the Constitution.
It's importantly a required subject from elementary school through high school.
It's also a very important subject in universities and people can study it in universities.
Also, notably, university students were involved.
University instructors, professors were involved in writing the curriculum, training students in the curriculum and revising the curriculum.
So there was a lot of investment in the curriculum throughout the whole broad swath of the education system.
It's a mandatory subject on university exams, meaning that students have to not only take the course,
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.
The curriculum outlines a particular notion of personhood that's oriented around democratic values,
constitutionalism, federalism, multiculturalism and the rule of law.
It educate students about human rights and democratic governance,
and it promotes qualities of hard work, industriousness, peacebuilding and loyalty to the state.
It places a great deal of emphasis on development and tolerance of diversity.
The curricula has been revised three times.
Some argued that it centres around three team themes constitutional democracy, which undergirds patriotism and government accountability,
individual responsibility, which is linked with the idea of living in a multi-ethnic country and participating in an interdependent world.
So we might think about these as three different forms of citizenship constitutional, multicultural and global and different ways.
In the context of Ethiopia civic and ethical education curriculum,
democracy refers to a collective understanding of one's duties as a constitutional and multicultural citizen.
So the curriculum, in short, teaches people to adapt to new forms of citizenship that the EPR death was trying
to put into place under the new constitution that introduced ethnic federalism,
but also democratic reforms.
So this is kind of a far cry from when when it rolled away from introducing democracy, that the curriculum stayed the same.
At the time, my fieldwork, the civic and Ethical Education Curriculum, increasingly was sent centrally situated in debates about the plight of youth,
economic and political marginalisation, the nature of citizenship and inclusive belonging for different groups,
as well as the appropriate forms of civic protest. Civic participation, such as protest,
ought to be noted that there was a lot of debate and criticism of the civics curriculum at that time around 2016 17.
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,
were critical of the civics curriculum because they perceived that it was simply government propaganda and
there was too much difference between the curriculum and the reality that the government was repressive.
The curriculum promoted democracy and human rights. Another critique was that it was it was propaganda of the EPA, RDF,
and evidence of this was that it took too critical a stance to earlier authoritarian leaders,
namely, people would cite that it depicted highly, highly Selassie as an authoritarian leader.
It depicted on the guest highly Marijan, the communist leader, as an authoritarian leader.
And people thought it was too critical on those leaders without being equally critical of the current the current leadership.
Other critiques were that it was promoting sort of an unruly generation of.
Youth by promoting rights more than it was promoting obligations and duties.
Some argued that it was too simple,
that it needed to have a more complex curriculum and that earlier versions of the curriculum had been more complex,
involve more reading, and the newer ones were kind of dumbed down in various different ways.
So this is the nature of these these critiques. But in general,
there was a sense that the curriculum had failed and that's why there was so much dissent
in Ethiopia and so many youth uprisings at the time of the state of emergency was called.
Surveillant backwards. All right.
All right.
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.
It's important to note that most when most of the civic and other ethical education core curriculum teachers were trained first,
there was a lot of investment in their training and they were actually quite well-trained in their subject matter.
And they were also tremendously excited, at least initially, and dedicated to the teaching of the subject.
They thought of themselves and of civic, civic and ethical education as not political, as sort of apolitical.
But they also thought of themselves as missionaries.
So they said things like, we think of ourselves not they think we're political missionaries, but we think we're citizenship missionaries.
So there's a strong sense of mission in their work. But this was not political work.
One teacher even said repeatedly that their work and the curriculum should be regarded as secular
and secular to him meant that they shouldn't be attached to a particular party or political group,
but rather that they were sort of neutrally transcending partisan politics and teaching the concepts and ideas that would make Democratic work,
which was really interesting that that was thought of as a more technical process and not a not a political not a political process.
At the same time, C teachers knew they were commonly labelled as political teachers by teachers and other students, by other teachers and students.
Most of the teachers were attracted because they genuinely liked and cared about the subject.
But they kept saying things like, as you can see on the sly, on the quotations I have on my slide.
Other teachers perceive us as instruments of the government. We're perceived as political missionaries, but we're citizenship missionaries.
So this set of ideas kept coming up over and over and over again. But for teachers,
their work was really about producing citizens who had knowledge and knew how to act as citizens of a country according to the Constitution.
This shows an interesting kind of anti politics in the way teachers thought about their world,
their work to sort of borrow loosely from James Ferguson's ideas about sort of development as an anti political anti politics machine.
Teaching citizenship was thought of as a sort of technical project of sorts.
If you know the curriculum, if you have a good curriculum, if you have a good teaching method,
you can build Democratic citizens in some ways not so much a process of teaching students to engage in political dissent.
If you knew how to teach and if you gave students the correct, ethical and moral and behaviour to be a citizen,
you should ideally have a better outcome for your government. But the anti political technical work of citizen building became political because the
government itself turned against its own state ideas that they had put into place.
At the same time, as the quotes on the screen show, teachers were thought of as doing political work.
So they were already sent, kind of caught between a rock and a hard place where everyone thought they were political.
They thought they were disseminating government propaganda and being set up intentionally to do that.
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.
One of the key things that I wanted to flag is that one teacher expl.
Actually, several teachers explained that things were different before 2005, 2005, 1997.
And the Ethiopian calendar was a year when up until that point,
people had a lot of faith in democracy and that the country was moving in a democratic direction.
Parliamentary elections that year, there was a great dispute about who had won the parliamentary elections,
leading to mass street protests and a massive government clampdown at that point,
which moved the march towards authoritarianism and government repression never came back after that point.
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.
So that was sort of seen as civic education was good before that particular moment.
And then after that particular moment, it didn't work anymore. Other comments suggested that students laughed at the curriculum because they could see
observed corruption and observed that the things that they were learning about weren't true.
They said that initially the curriculum was good, it had credibility,
but then it lost its credibility in the face of things going a different direction.
So it's striking that teachers were trained and charged with the idea of promoting the idea of the
state that was purveyed by the curriculum and idea oriented around citizenship and democracy.
But that their work was equated as propaganda that was trying to hide the realities of what the state had actually become.
So it's an interesting it's an interesting dilemma, despite the fact that teachers themselves really didn't see themselves as promoting
these these values in the face of a place where that was no longer possible to do that.
A couple of quick examples to to show sort of how this played out on the next two slides.
I have quotations from the civics curriculum on one side of the slide in quotations from civics curriculum,
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.
So the curriculum in Unit one of the great elevon curriculum in. Plays out in a lot of different units of the curriculum.
There's a lot of emphasis on on transparency. Students are given are quoted from the Constitution about transparency.
There's a lot of explanation of what transparency is there, even given an assignment.
A group work assignment where they're supposed to figure out how to tell how transparent their own school is.
So clearly, the curriculum itself is trying to encourage students to be Democratic citizens who know how to demand government transparency.
And then the teacher comments that we teach them about accountability and transparency.
But then they see leaders abusing their power and they basically saying they know that if they challenge someone's in power,
they're going to be hunted down and go to prison. And it's going to lead to problems for them.
So the reality and what students actually see in practise is really nowhere close to each other.
Similarly and importantly for it, for our subject matter, the same thing plays out around the idea of street of street protests.
So, again, in one of the units from the great elevon curriculum, the idea of whether students should protest or not was hotly debated.
This is the debate that got that got Elsah arrested.
The curriculum notes that students have the right to protest and goes through a fairly extensive case study
about how a group of students staged a demonstration in Addis Ababa against female genital mutilation.
They get permission for it. They attract lots of people and they get the attention of their government officials and changes made.
And, yeah, it's it's a good success story. However, the reality is that that not only can students not stage protests,
but if teachers attempt to discuss with students the correct conditions in the correct ways to to stage a protest,
then students like Elsah teachers like Elsa can be arrested.
So teachers are very, very aware of the fact that despite the fact that students have the constitutional right to protest,
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.
So this the same kind of distinction between what the text not only says, but engages students in activities,
interactive group sessions to try to learn how to do like state protests and hold
institutions accountable is completely belied by what their actual experience in in life is.
So speaking of education teachers,
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,
they were very wary of realising a politically mobilised teachers.
Yes. And yet they had this text that they had to teach.
So there was they were stuck in a few different ways between the text,
between the reality and as we'll see in a minute, between what the students were actually demanding and asking for.
So teachers, technocratic and anti political stance also extended towards their stance, towards their students in an interesting way.
So another paradox that we see in teachers in the teaching of civics is that all they believe,
although they believe deeply and teaching students about their democratic constitutional human rights,
they're worried that students were too fixated on their rights and not considering their responsibilities enough.
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.
More and more generally, the young generation is more concerned about their rights, not the rest responsibilities.
So when I asked teachers what this meant to be concerned about their responsibilities, they would say things like they should wear their uniforms,
they should cover their exercise books, they should take care of the schools, they should follow the school rules.
So I found this very curious that that duties were all about taking care of
your school and rights were potentially sort of something something bigger,
something about students sort of feeling the need to march in the streets and potentially potentially protest.
So there's a sort of depoliticising in all of this also,
but also a sense that teachers are thinking about if students learn how to take care of their school,
if they learn discipline at the school level,
they will be more disciplined when they grow up and go off into the world and take on bigger political roles.
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,
and they somehow didn't have the maturity to be able to take on larger political roles now.
So I think there's concern about students being overly political,
was partly born from some cultural elements that suggest that young people should be respectful and different to old people,
partly borne by some sort of more generalised concerns about restive youth marching in the street,
which in many countries have been talked about as potentially problematic and unsettled.
But I think it also kind of gets back to some in some way to this idea for normalcy.
Again, recalling the idea of the maddening state. Right, that let's just get back to normal.
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.
Let's get students acting like students instead of instead of pushing back against this.
I think the anti political machinery going on here with teachers attitudes towards students,
I think also gets gets back at Atman and Bambis idea of impotence,
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.
Just sort of just do your thing. Just be a good student. Don't make waves.
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.
Instead, it becomes the sort of politically disempowering or apolitical thing.
So when we what do we do at this late arrest, Etzel elses arrest, start to mix a lot,
make a little bit more sense by even addressing or engaging in a discussion with students about protests,
she's stepping away from her technocratic role. Right.
So she's expected to just kind of tell students, be a good student study as soon as she's even answered their question.
She's already being too political in some ways, which may be one of the reasons why she was particularly vulnerable to to
being arrested because she she didn't depoliticise completely in that moment.
She instead engaged in some kind of political question, even if it was to say, here's why this is happening.
So a final interesting element that came out in conversations with civics teacher was the idea that the students don't have fear,
but the teachers are afraid. So I've already pointed out that teachers are an extremely difficult position.
They're caught between the ideals of the curriculum.
They believe in repression of the state, which they don't like, but they sort of make their peace with in some ways,
a sense that the state was surveilling them, which made them feel like they had to walk, tread very, very carefully.
And then the final thing that was challenging them was students challenging them
themselves because students were not taking on this this apolitical role in the same way.
So teachers had a sense of duty to ideals and a sense that they didn't really
want to be doing political work because they were citizenship missionaries,
not political missionaries, but students were constantly pushing, pushing back on them.
And it's an interesting question to think about. Why were students afraid and teachers were not afraid?
And I want to bring back in here so as Miles idea about pedagogical violence.
And in a minute,
I'll suggest that there was something of a generational effect going on here where teachers had had more historical and lived memory of
earlier forms of political violence that made them more wary of engaging them than students might have been in in some in some ways.
So teachers remembered, as it suggested in the first quotation I have here,
that other teachers had faced consequences because they took the curriculum too far,
politicised it too much, or pushback against the pushback against the government.
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.
Other teachers had pay docked. Other teachers were coerced into joining the party.
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.
The second quotation gets it, the idea that that teachers see students challenges as as risky.
So when students ask teachers to answer questions and to answer this question about life, why is this not happening in reality?
Teachers feel challenged by that. Teachers feel like they're potentially afraid, afraid of that.
So I think that's that's an important thing thing to think about.
Another quote that I didn't put up here also makes a really, really interesting point that that students see what's going on.
They see the reality. They want to talk about it. And then students in turn turn around and speak freely,
but that teachers won't speak freely because they've been one teacher even said teachers have been in prison during the previous regimes.
So teachers are calling on an earlier historical memory, the fact that state violence is still very close to the skin for them.
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.
They're very worried in this moment of taking too much, taking too much of a risk.
So I suggest that there's a generational effect on students lack of fear. And teachers fear the pedagogies of state violence and repression.
Clearly affected students and teachers in very different ways, making teachers cautious and students in some ways bold.
And it has to do with memory as well as the fact that teachers felt like they were they were in danger.
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.
And the final quotation I have appears a little bit different. And I think a little bit more complex.
This particular teacher began by talking about students.
Their students don't have a fear of teaching openly, but also talked about the way the teacher and the government feared each other.
So this teacher says because of this, the government fears the teachers and the teachers fear the government.
So teachers can challenge the government.
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.
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.
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.
Government is afraid of the teachers. And as a result, neither one is particularly doing anything to sort of move forward.
The government's not able to do as good a job at repressing it. That's what it wants to do here.
Teachers are not then doing as good a job at sort of moving into democratic citizenship
and educating in those ways because everyone's hamstrung by their fear of of the other.
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,
and can we get out of this cycle of impotence into something that looks transformative?
So the idea of teachers not judging and just teaching, what is written in some ways is kind of the height of impotence,
as was suggested in the last quotation, fearful of teaching curriculum and the interactive way it was written to be taught,
teachers were unable to even produce what the texts that they were given, the curriculum that they were trained in,
the curriculum that the government had designed for them to teach in order to
support what the government initially said was its state building projects.
So teachers are so impotent that they can't even teach the state building project
that they're trained and charged with teaching that the government has invested in.
So this teachers uncertain about how to do their job safely and the government without a way to
legitimate disseminate or socialise students into the state building project that they're promoting.
There are authoritarian regimes that do figure out ways to socialise state subjects into being dostal subjects of an authoritarian regime.
Ethiopia hasn't particularly done that.
So there's sort of cotton is kind of in between way where they have this text that socialises students into being Democratic citizens.
And then that's not the way the states behaving. So there's this dumb disjuncture there.
But teachers are also left with a sense of mission. They're aware of this paradox.
They're aware of the importance of this condition of them that they're in with the government.
And at least some of them still felt like they had a responsibility to push beyond it by not keeping silent.
So I think the other quotation I have up there is also important, which is you have to keep struggling.
You have to keep talking.
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.
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.
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.
Despite her arrest, she said that she remains strong and even in the face of what had happened to her,
she was determined to stay strong and offered a critique of what would have what should have happened,
which is both mundane, I think, and revolutionary.
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.
So here I asked her sort of what she was mentioning, gaps that exist in governance.
And we might think of that as the gap between the state idea and state in practise.
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.
What she said is that this was unnecessary interference and had a very pragmatic solution, she said.
In my situation, this could have been addressed by the school. This was not the jurisdiction of the police.
So effectively, she's saying, let's get the police out of the school.
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.
She said if there's a complaint from a student, that's the purview of the school.
So she's asking for something much more humble and modest in some way.
She's asking for sort of clear delineations for different state actors to do their jobs differently.
And she concludes saying, But. But I'm strong now. I'm even stronger than before.
I'm a civics teacher, and it's my responsibility to talk about democracy. But when we talk about the reality, it's horrible.
So in conclusion, she just to leave here her with your words, she's basically saying it's a good curriculum.
Let me just continue to do my job and move on. All right.
And I look forward to your questions.
Thank you very much for that, Excelencia Genta. So to question us now.
If you have questions and you might type your questions into the conversation box and then I might ask you to go on to
ask the right people if you want to just raise your digital point and then they can call on you to ask your question.
So if I can start Jennifer, I am.
It's quite fascinating, the confluence between the idea of the state and state effect and then they took out context.
So I was wondering what agents of the state how do you get.
So the state defended this wide gulf between the critical elements of civic education and ascetic practises.
The attempted defenders. So don't even bother to articulate any kind of defence of discourse between state parties and civic.
What the core elements of civic education. You know, it's that's that's a really, really interesting question.
So in the moment when I was doing this research. No, they were they were not defending it.
They were either remaining completely silent about it.
And there were civics teachers that I interviewed who just were were very, very sort of quiet about sort of just very factual.
Here's what I teach. Here's what I do. And they wouldn't comment.
And then there were others that were more willing to the open as the ones that I quoted were.
But nobody tried to defend the gap and to say this is OK.
It would be interesting to know and this would require a different kind of research.
If in an earlier or different moment in history, say around 2005 or 2004,
if at that point civics teachers were still trying to defend the defend the gap.
But by 2016, when I was there, I don't think anyone was trying to say, here's how we can spend now.
Having said that, I think when teachers say things like students can protest, but there needs to be procedures for it.
I think that that's a way that you could defend that gap.
You could sort of take a technocratic response and say, we need them to do this the right way.
We need them to not just sort of go out and be angry. We need them to think in a more measured way.
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.
The teacher who was probably doing her best.
I mean, she was probably trying in some ways to defend that gap and say, look, these protesters are doing it the wrong way.
They didn't get permission. They didn't go through proper procedures. They're being violent.
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
that teachers could defend the gap by just going back to the curriculum.
But I think by this point, most of the teachers were not buying into that.
They weren't buying into the to what the government was doing into the practise, for the most part.
So it was a moment of too much extreme. Now, later on.
It would be going back and looking at that question would be a really interesting
thing to do now when they're in the process of revising the civics curriculum again.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out or to go back.
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.
There's very, very little research on the civics curriculum.
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.
OK. Perhaps that would also include, you know, the new piece that we'll be examining.
Also, the public discourse that's in the media about this,
because it shown that a home being costeja about a geriatric Jameson Africa is a threat to the social order.
And by and by now, I do have to point the talk was about teachers teaching.
What do I not teach to teach night politics? Teach us actually paid to teach these things.
But that story is not expected to practise what they have been taught, which is very interesting in terms of how, you know,
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.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's that's in some ways an authoritarian states.
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.
But this was actually in this case, they were teaching the curriculum and the curriculum itself was no longer acceptable,
which made it made for a really interesting, interesting moment of kind of crisis or contradiction for the government.
Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Jesse. Face as can hear me.
Yes. Great. Jane, it's very nice to see you speak.