-The fact that photographs from Ethiopia in Western mass media have a tendency to represent famine and war only has urged me to tell other stories about a people I admire for their strength and resilience, says Thera Mjaaland, who is currently doing her PhD at the Section for Gender and Development, University of Bergen in Norway. The objective of her thesis from Tigray is to investigate gendered processes of change by focusing on the field of women and girls’ education that has attained international attention for a couple of decades now.
- I have interviewed women in three generations; aged 18-30, 30-50 and 50 and above, to be able to trace processes of change over time. Education to the people, both men and women, had been an issue during the struggle in Tigray (1975-91). And while women ventured to berekha (the wilds) to participate in the struggle against the Derg, and to work for a gender-just society afterwards, a tendency among girls in the Tigrayan context today is to use precisely education as a means to negotiate their own future, particularly when it comes to the issue of early marriage, says Mjaaland.
Fighter women often downplay their role in the struggle; the only woman that have ever asked me to photograph her with a weapon had in fact never been a fighter.
. Photo: Thera MjaalandAccording to Mjaaland, there are enormous changes in access to education in Tigray over the last generations (even over the last decade only), but the job market is not necessarily following suit. While the gender gap in education is closing, parents also see both their sons and daughters failing, especially the 10th grade exam; making their investment in education less worth while.
- I study how women navigate in this new landscape that education has made possible. I am interested in how these possibilities are utilised (or not), and likewise, which alternative strategies that might be opted for as equally relevant in the current pressured economic and ecological situation.
In my Master thesis from the same area, “Ane suqh' ile. I keep quiet”, I claimed that normative gender identity puts limits on women’s spaces for agency. However, seeming compliance and under-communication of what they actually do in practice are precisely strategies that makes women’s agency possible without arousing social sanctions. In my PhD thesis my argument is similarly centred on how normative gender identity requires of the school girls a modesty that might make it difficult for them to be active in class; to be audible and visible as clever (female) students. From this point of view it is not early marriage per se that hinders girls’ education, but rather the sanctions put on being a respectable girl and woman that makes success in education difficult, and which eventually brings them back to marriage. While education (during and after the struggle) has brought many fighter women in position today, it might seem however that the daring forthrightness that made them take up arms has been lost as legitimate female behaviour.
A new generation of girls armed with school books. Photo: Thera MjaalandThera Mjaaland is a versatile professional, combining social anthropology with photography, both as documentation and as art. A lot of her work is displayed through her webpage: http://www.thera.no/