Revolutionary Struggles and Girls’ Education

Thera Mjaaland 
Social anthropologist and filmmaker

Elaine Unterhalter, University College London 
Vibeke Vågenes, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences 
Mulu Beyene Kidanemariam, University of Bergen 
Haldis Haukanes (moderator), University of Bergen 

"Revolutionary Struggles and Girls’ Education: At the Frontiers of Gender Norms in North- Ethiopia", by Thera Mjaaland is about the gender norms that do not necessarily change even though women participate in liberation struggles and girls get access to education.

The book sees this issue in relation to prevailing neoliberal development discourse where gender equality is understood as parity between girls and boys, women and men, and does not touch upon deep-rooted and hard-lived relations of power in the case of gender and sexuality.

Based on the central role that education has gained in the forwarding of development, this work also asks how exactly education can change anything when based on rote learning/memorization and does not encourage critical thinking. Given the current political developments in Ethiopia, this anthropological monograph has also (unintendedly) become an historical document about what is now being lost in the ongoing civil war in Tigray.