 And I'm one of the founders of this series and one of his editors as well, the book. And in the book series, we now have 17 books. The first was published in 2015 and the most recent being Rameena's. So just a very quick plug. If anyone's got anything they're working on broadly in the area of religion and development, then please feel free to get in touch. We're always looking for new publications. So I just want to say a few words about the gap that this book series has attempted to fill and then also to say something about the distinctive contribution that Rameena's book makes to this field. So we're going to do a bit of history first of all. And if we go back to the late 1990s and the early 2000s, so this was the time that I was first wanting to publish in the area of religion and development. I was finishing up my PhD. I had my first academic job in fact at Leeds. There was no religions and development field. It didn't exist. Development studies journals were extremely reluctant to publish articles on this topic. Mistaking calls to take religion seriously for attempts to promote religion. And religious studies scholars and theologians have not themselves yet recognized the specialist that the specialist and secular field of development studies for something that they could contribute to. There were a few outliers here and there were one or two books. Sarah White now at Bath had a book on theology and development. There was a 1980s special issue of the journal World Development. And I think in the year 2000 as well in the World Bank, Catherine Marshall began the Worldface Development Dialogue which is now at the Berkeley Center at Georgetown University. So there were a few outliers but generally it was a very hostile field development studies to welcoming religious studies or the contribution of scholars of religion to their area. So it was also the case that at this time development policy and practice was very wary about engaging with faith actors out of concerns that this might jeopardize their principles of impartiality and neutrality and that engaging with religion and faith act was more likely to do more harm than good, particularly where issues of gender roles and relationships were concerned. And this is very much the focus of Ramina's book. And also the view that modernization and development would inevitably be accompanied by secularization was firmly entrenched in the secular, left-leaning liberal world of development. So that's a bit of the history. If we fast forward now 20 years, we today have a vibrant religions and development field that's interdisciplinary and global. So what happened? What changed? So a combination of factors, as we all know, thrust issues of faith and the role of faith actors into the center of the development and humanitarian world as they did for other sectors of global civil society and foreign policy. So the failure of the secularization thesis, the global resurgence of religion. So 9-11, the rise of Islamic radical movements playing a large role here. All of these combined factors very much led to what we might call a turn to religion by the mid-2000s. And we see this across all sectors of society from global institutions to national governments and local civil society, where faith actors are increasingly part of public discourses and faith-based organizations that today much more likely to get funding for their work from donors. And in step with these changes in society, academics have responded with ever-increasing numbers of studies on what faith-based organizations are, what they do and what their distinctive contribution is. And this, I think, is very much where this book series fits, why there was a need for it to specifically have a focus on religion and development writing. Now, one critique of this turn to religion, both in terms of its scholarship and also in terms of its practice, has been that it's little more than a donor or government response to meet their needs, to better understand how they can better engage with or instrumentalize, if you like, faith actors to help them meet their preset northern development goals. And that the perception of the religion development nexus from the point of view of individuals and local faith communities in the global South has been largely overlooked or at least not taken seriously. So I think there's also a need at this juncture, and I think this is a limitation that many of us have realized and certainly Ramina's book fills this gap, that there's a need for a local turn as well in religion and development policy and practice. And this, I think, is very much where Ramina's book, so the title of her book, A Decolonial Gender and Development Approach in Local Religious Contexts, Understanding Domestic Violence and Ethiopia, I think it makes a very distinctive contribution to this need for a local turn within religion and development policy, practice and scholarship. Now, Ramina's book also makes a distinctive and welcome contribution to the literature on gender, religion and development. As with the broader religion and development field, there's been a tendency within the literature on gender to import a set of Eurocentric discussions about the kind of role that religion plays alongside what counts as development and progress. And to quote from Ramina's book, she writes that many gender and development writers describe religious beliefs as ideologies or as fundamentalist expressions if they are invoked to oppose gender equality, agendas and initiatives. It must be entertained, she argues, that when religious communities or individuals fail to resonate with a program that aims to promote gender equality as expressed, for instance, in the language of SDG5, they may not be actually opposing the idea of a more egalitarian gender relations per se, but instead the metaphysical connotations that the concept has within Western epistemology and experience and the neocolonial act of transposing this onto their societies as if they should be considered normative. She continues to argue that there is a need for theoretical frameworks that explain gender realities within local worldviews as inseparable from religious traditions to achieve a better understanding of gender relations and embodiments in societies located outside of Western experience. Now, it's also common within scholarship on gender, within gender and development studies that we don't just want to understand how religion and gender intersect to impact on women's wellbeing and development, but also we want to be able to inform policy and practice. And again, this is firmly at the center of Ramina's work in this book. She writes that as an alternative and on the basis of my overall experience in this specific study from Ethiopia, I propose that gender sensitive research and practice must be based on theoretical constructs emanating from local discourses, which should then guide practical interventions on the ground, ideally led by or co-led by local researchers and practitioners. So just to finish, I really want to underscore, and I think particularly also in this era where we're becoming much more aware of issues of racism within the development and aid business and the need to decolonize development, I really want to underscore the urgent need for much more locally focused research that examines the dynamics, for instance, between religion, gender, and development, and the implications of this for informing practical interventions. And I think this is really crucial, a really crucial point to finish on, that as Ramina's study argues, as she demonstrates in her book, the necessity for developing interventions that are attuned to the local religious life and attempt to reverse pernicious social norms, attitudes or practices, in this case, in reference to orthodox theology and the local ecclesiastical tradition is clear even if this might not always mesh with secular liberal understandings of progress and development. Well, we need to take these local differences and local discourses seriously, okay? All right, so I'm going to finish there. Again, thank you for asking me to set the context for this. And I look forward to hearing what Ramina has to say about her book. So thank you. I'll jump straight in, right, Mars? Thank you so much, Emma, this was excellent. I was listening with great interest. It's interesting to hear someone describe my work. I've been living in my mind for the past, I don't know how many years, arguing and having monologues with myself about the relevance of this argument. And it's, I appreciate it very much that you resonate with it and that you think that it fits very well with the times and it does make that contribution. So I'll just jump very quickly to my presentation. I will share my screen. I have a PowerPoint. Oh, Lars, I believe I can't, I'm disabled from sharing. If you make me a host, I will be able to share. Alternatively, I can also send the PowerPoint to you so you can share it. Apologies for that. Okay, yes. So now I can share. Thank you so much, Lars. Lovely. You can see it now. Lovely, okay. Yes, so this is the cover of the book. I think Emma put it very nicely into context. It speaks to all these debates. And what I thought I'd do today, first and foremost, a disclaimer. It's very hard to summarize a book of 300 pages and a complex argument that combines three, four disciplines in this little time. So I wouldn't honor the argument no matter what I decided to include in this presentation. So I actually thought that what I could do today is tell you a bit more about the motivations in the background and give you the background story of what led to this book and how the background informs the main premises, guiding questions and objectives of the book. And then through that sort of narrative and narration, hopefully the argument in the approach will become evident as Emma very well hinted to. And then I'll very quickly look at the study in Aksum because this ethnographic study was really the case study that allowed me to demonstrate the argument but also strengthen it and articulate it even better. And then I'll end with some acknowledgments and thanks, hopefully all in 30 minutes. So the motivations, I think this, if I would have to trace this book, I would go as far back to 2010 really, when I was a BA student in the United States with a scholarship. And during that period, I worked for economics faculty at Bates and they were looking at agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now that was a time as Emma said that the gender and development paradigm was very much internationalized. So I was looking at the documents from the Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, on agricultural systems in Africa. And the gender paradigm was sort of the mainstream theoretical lens through which gender relations in agricultural livelihoods in these countries were approached. And what I found a bit surprising was that the testimonies, the actual discourses of the female and male farmers were nowhere to be found. I kept asking my professors, but what do the farmers think? What do the men and women think about women's role in food security, for example? And so that experience led me to develop a research project of my own design where I would visit four African countries with very different agricultural systems and histories and political contexts. And I would interview female and male farmers primarily in rural communities and urban communities to try and understand how they relate to each other in the gender relations and the gender dynamics and what they think about these asymmetries that the Food and Agriculture Organization seemed to place emphasis on. So I was very fortunate to obtain a Thomas G. Watson fellowship, which allowed me to visit Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Rwanda and spend one year in over 60 rural and urban communities. And based on my estimations and interviews I conducted, again, I wasn't a rigorous researcher at the time. I did my best. I tried to be ethical. I tried to be reflexive about everything I did, obtained consent. Nobody had trained me. I just wanted to respect human dignity and do things the right way. So I spoke to about 300 farmers in that year. And what emerged from that experience was that gender realities were considerably more nuanced, complex and non-uniform than they were described in the Eglinton literature. And also the more striking finding was the vernacular aspects of vernacular life, people's belief systems, people's value systems and how those influence their thinking and their behavior and gender relations and gender subjectivities was simply ignored in this literature. It was as if it didn't matter at all. And this, to me, evidenced for the first time a deeply secularized development sector. That was in 2013 when I completed that research. So even in 2013, in the agricultural sector that I was dealing with, it felt very much secularized despite the shifts that Emma described. So I thought I'd show you a bit of photographic material to give you a better sense of what I went through and experienced. I had a lovely experience in all the countries I went to. The people I stayed with, farmers and agricultural development agents were absolutely welcoming and gave me the time. And it was truly a positive experience which strengthened my interest in this region and my determination to go back and do something more sustainable, I guess. All the people depicted in the photos were asked for consent before taking the pictures as a disclaimer. And they're people I respect and trust and have, you know, I'm friends with. So they're not just snapshots of random people which is a practice that I think is quite unethical. So the first one was from Ghana in Ashanti region. What I usually did was to do groups, discussion groups or dialogical workshops with farmers, male and female, sometimes combined, sometimes gender specific to discuss how they understood, you know, agricultural livelihoods, gender asymmetries, you know, issues of climate change and various other issues that they prioritized and thought about. I also stayed in various homes. This is from a female friend who was boiling palm flowers to extract palm oil and she was very curious to show me the process, you know, and her role in, you know, her sort of knowledge of how to produce and how to earn a revenue. I moved to Northern region, to the northern region in Ghana. Again, I had some interviews with indigenous marriages in Muslim communities. The Northern region is predominantly Muslim. And then I moved to Ethiopia. This is the first picture I took of the church of the savior of the world, Medhan-e-alem in Bole, in Addis Ababa, which is the largest church in Ethiopia, as far as I know. And then I went to the north of the country. I visited all five regions, main regions of Ethiopia, but I stayed quite a bit in Tigray. This is from Azmi Wumberta Waredah, a market day where I spent, you know, it's located in the highlands and I spent some time there to understand better, you know, agricultural realities. And then I moved to Rwanda. This is a picture from Ruhanga district of a school in the mountains. And another photo of a woman who was considered the poorest in the local village, living on a mountain top with your, I believe, three children. And, you know, which evidences that, you know, the very diverse realities that people lived in these different contexts. I then moved to Tanzania. And after spending some time in Dar es Salaam, I visited Moazah city in Lake Region and the village is nearby. And obviously, some were inaccessible. We had to take the motorbikes in order to be able to access the communities. And again, we had conversations, you know, dialogical sort of reflective discussions with the farmers, a true privilege for me at that age to be able to be given that time and respect and energy, people's energy to discuss these issues and to understand and to open my thinking. So after this experience, I was entirely disillusioned with Western epistemology and the way, you know, non-Western societies were depicted, especially when it came to gender relations because I saw a very nuanced situation. I saw families where women were very much decision makers, you know, they earned revenue. It was a very complex landscape. And also in families where religious values mattered and informed, you know, women's behavior and, you know, sort of oftentimes served as a source of empowerment. So I spent the next one year thinking, you know, what can I do to change this discourse and to set this epistemological injustice right? This is an international sector that has, you know, is comprised of multiple actors and agents and I can't possibly do something that can set this record right to some extent. And in that one year, what I did, I developed my own approach, this dialogical participatory approach that I described that I used with the farmers, which essentially would use cultural practices of communication and conflict resolution and issue, you know, discussing issues in the local community, also to discuss gender related issues and to understand together how these might be resolved. And I will describe it later on, I'll refer to it, but essentially it uses a Socratic approach. So it doesn't assume that you know, but it, you know, you serve as a, you are a student yourself and you're asking the participants and the interlocutors to help you learn, to help you understand together. So it's a more dialogical format in its essence. And then I was very privileged to obtain the, a scholarship to study ideas and an MA in Gender and Development in the UK. And this was my first exposure to Anglophone education in Gender and Development, which I know what I mean. And I was a bit shocked. It was one of the most frustrating years in my life, I have to say, up to this very day, because all my instructors and peers who came from different international backgrounds, based in London, although based in London, tended to accept, you know, theories of gender inequality as universal and as pertinent everywhere. We felt really considering the historical and context-specific particularities of different societies. And when I spoke about the egalitarian gender practices that I saw, for instance, in my one year in the four African countries or from my home regions, Eastern and Southern Europe, I encountered silence. A lot of people thought that I was idiosyncratic or some people called me too intelligent, as if I was saying something that it was inaccessible to others. And I felt subalternized to use Beatrice Bivak's expression if I may. And most importantly, the gender theory we were taught was very much grounded in a secular logic and a social constructionist feminist metaphysics of both humanity and gender, all of which follow from, you know, a genealogy of philosophies informed by Western society's experience with theological dogmatism, enlightenment struggles and post-enlightenment thinking. And I just couldn't understand why this was imposed on us as normative, as if this was the truth. When gender and development theory was about questioning the idea that someone has the truth and can impose it on you. So I saw this inconsistency that I thought needed to be addressed. And of course, as Emma said, religious belief systems, faithfulness and intersections with gender norms and gender subjectivities in religious societies were not sufficiently recognized. It wasn't at point of discussion. When I spoke and told them that I wanted to do an ethnographic study as part of my MA, I received some funding to do that. There was no supervisor to support me in that research because there was nobody specialization in religious and gender studies, I guess, at the time. So this is me during the year of the MA. I traveled three times to Senegal. It's to the village in Futatoro, which is called Guille de Chantier. The village, I knew the village because I knew the mayor and he invited me because he was very interested in having someone who could help perhaps in analyzing gender asymmetries and local agricultural livelihoods, but in a way that was really culturally sensitive. This is a Muslim Sufi community, very much traditional in terms of gender roles. And he was very keen to ensure that whoever, the researcher who would support this project would be sensitive to these realities and this tradition, the people's valued traditions. So again, I used a number, this is the approach I piloted and then I sort of strengthened in this current study that I will present today that the book is about, which was a combination of ethnographic research. In this case, I had very little time in Senegal, but it was living in the community, participating in the community life, understanding, having interviews with people, doing surveys with households, and then combining with workshops with the community and I prefer to do mixed workshops, men and women, because depending on the topic, it was not very sensitive. It was actually quite effective in getting men and women to talk to each other and trigger that dialogue. And it was very, very, very effective. The community thought that it was a very interesting way of bringing them all together and sort of thinking about issues that concern their society out loud, which they don't always did. They didn't always do, I'm sorry. So that kind of strengthened my, I guess, confidence that this is an approach that might work in order to localize development analysis and research and obviously the interventions that follow subsequently. So the guiding questions of this book, as Emma said, the book is informed by this, the overall experiences I've had, but as I went more closely into the gender and development literature and looked closely at the metaphysics of humanity and gender that I refer to, it became clear that the paradigm of gender and development which followed other paradigms, the women and development paradigm and earlier than that, the women in development paradigm leading tracing back to the late 1970s, early 1980s had been institutionalized and had been universalized. Whereas the width and what paradigms had been criticized for various reasons, even from more decolonial perspectives in recent years, the gender and development paradigm which has been internationalized since the 1990s and it places more emphasis on gender relations, the relationality really aspect that was omitted in the previous paradigms. The previous paradigms tended to look only at women and oftentimes missed the relationship with the males and the other stakeholders in the community. Whereas the gender and development paradigm placed much more emphasis on that relationality factor and also the necessity of contextualizing gender relations in the wider socio-cultural system. However, in its internationalization, very little discussion had occurred on how gender sensitive researchers and practitioners who wanted to do research in a non-local context such as my case should account for local belief and knowledge systems in the gender analysis theorization and sensitization process. There wasn't really any discussion about the ethical, the epistemological problems of this task which can be actually very, very challenging. So despite a lot of critique around gender mainstreaming in recent years, because it has been co-opted because it places emphasis on the bodies of men. So looking at how male and female relate to each other as opposed to how men and women in the locals as understood in the local socio-cultural context relate to each other and various other critiques. Actually, these critiques have not really come being informed by epistemological concerns such as the ones that I outlined. So the idea of gender, for example, or the concept of gender or the concept of gender equality hasn't been really deconstructed and problematized on the basis of the metaphysical assumptions, the fundamental assumptions it makes about what constitutes a human being or what constitutes gender identity because these concepts differ in each cultural system and its belief system and knowledge system. So my argument is that because this hasn't happened these concepts tend to not provide us with a complete understanding of gender-related issues in contexts that are not Western and especially non-secular worldviews. And the question really that I ask and that I suggest needs more consideration and attention is I'll read out loud how to achieve gender-sensitive research in a way that recognizes diversity of thought and worldviews around gender normativity, diverse gender realities and modes of gender subjectivity and that engages with this diversity throughout the process of research conceptualization, implementation and diffusion. And this question obviously is informed by my own research but it's also informed by critiques by previous African and Asian and many other non-Western scholars including Oye Oye Ronke, Sabah Mahmood, Filomena Choma Steady, Okiro Nuzengu. All of whom have criticized gender theorizations and their sort of universalist or essentialist application cross-culturally from different perspectives, but they all inform the kind of questions that I'm asking in this book. So apologies, so the objectives of the book really if I just them very briefly is to evidence the need to suspend generic theoretical frameworks because these generic theoretical frameworks are never generic, they're all grounded in certain metaphysics of humanity and gender that tend to be informed by Western society's experience because these societies have been most prominent not only due to colonial histories but also to material inequality. Knowledge production is usually dictated by these societies, high-income societies that have the material benefit of creating and publishing knowledge. And to emphasize the need of bridging theory in development in gender and development and practice with the lived experiences of local communities with locally grounded studies that understand local issues and their gender dimensions through people's and conceptual repertoires, through the concepts, the language and the terms and the concepts that people themselves use. So the underlying argument here is that theories should not be a telos in itself, which I'll come back to but it should emerge from the ground up as Emma read in the excerpt earlier. And also to draw attention to the importance of epistemological situatedness and to render the positionality of the researcher or practitioner visible in the research process by cultivating self-awareness, self-awareness of one subjectivity and the biases that this subjectivity implies and how these biases then inform research and shape the research process and one's relationship to one's interlocutors. And finally to integrate the process of linguistic and cultural translation, what I understand as linguistic and cultural translation into development analysis and practice. I really want to make this emphasis and the book does demonstrate it as you go through the ethnographic chapters and how I struggled with my subjectivity within this research and communication with the participants that framing research, communicating with interlocutors of different positionalities than your own and translating data entails many subjective decisions and interpretations. And these have to be made part of the research. They have, they need to be made visible in the research process so that the reader can actually appraise the research for what it is. Apologies. The other critique or the other sort of focus area in this book that I sort of undertake to scrutinize is the paradigm of gender-based violence since my research is focusing on domestic violence. Most of the research that occurs on domestic violence in low and middle income countries is approached through the gender-based violence paradigm. Now, this paradigm, so that's mostly studies in global health and gender development. Now, this paradigm essentially is not just a concept, it's an etiology. It's an explanation of why domestic violence occurs in this context. And usually it favours gender parameters as explanatory factors, so gender asymmetries, gender norms and various other gender-related factors. And it's usually applied through a sociological methodology. So essentially it's a theory that is then applied to the low and middle income context of study each time. However, this happens oftentimes in most cases without demonstrating why the theory is relevant in that context before applying it. It's not grounded in ethnographic studies that actually demonstrate how wider belief systems, gender norms, social norms and human behavior relate to each other. So actually we lack the evidence that shows the causal mechanisms and the relationships between these different parameters to be able to say that yes is gender inequality or yes is gender asymmetries that causes domestic violence. That statement is very strong and it's very hard to make without that evidence in place. Moreover, most of the Chibi literature has focused historically on women, marginalizing men and as most of you know, the majority of the perpetrators are males. And although the trend has started to change, we still lack studies again that plays the motivations of the perpetrators within their wider sociocultural belief systems, psychological parameters and various other relationships that are important to account for. And finally and most importantly, this etiology again being informed by a feminist theory that is very highly political, right? It has a tendency to universalize gender hierarchies. It assumes that these gender hierarchies exist as per the theory. And it tends to appraise cultural and religious institutions as loci or female subordination contributing to women's abuse. Now, of course this does happen to some extent and in some aspects, but it monolithically also misrepresents the importance that religious, where the role of the religious traditions and religious belief systems have in these societies. And also it doesn't allow us to appreciate the potential resourcefulness of religious traditions and beliefs and values or spirituality, the importance that spirituality has for individuals. And another critique that I have that I wanted to mention is what I discern and as a double standard really in domestic violence research internationally, most of the research on domestic violence in North America and Western Europe uses a combination of theoretical paradigms, whether it is family studies, paradigms, feminist studies, psychological theories of violence and integrates these different explanatory factors to make sense of the phenomenon, okay? Much of this literature pays enough attention to psychological and intergenerational parameters of violence and also personality disorders. So it looks at the personality of the perpetrator. When research just conducted in low and middle income countries, however, most of the analytical frameworks used to understand domestic violence are usually feminist or socio-social theories of domestic violence. So usually the fault, the cause of the domestic violence are cultural or sociological etiologies. And these again are not demonstrated, they're usually assumed on the basis of certain indicators. So I'm asking here based relying on the previous work of Uman Ariyan and Letit Lobb, is this starborn emphasis on cultural and sociological explanations of domestic violence or intimate partner violence in low and middle income context? A continuation of historical racist beliefs in Anglo-American literature about less civilized cultures. There used to be historically this belief that African cultures are inherently more violent, for example. When I see that these paradigms, these cultural explanations continue and there is this starborn insistence and neglect of psychological theories of violence, for example. I feel that there is enough indication that these racist beliefs do continue. And finally, the book speaks to some problematic tendencies in religious studies. This is the others field I'm based in, that Emma is also based in. As Emma said, the mainstream epistemology around religion, which is a 19th century construct emerges as the product of Western societies, distinct experiences with Western Christianity, as I said, theological dogmatism, the co-option of theology by politics, and then subsequent enlightenment movements to liberate the mind from theology and the public life from religion, made it necessary to actually reconceptualize how we do religious studies in non-Western contexts who did not go through these experiences, who did not go through this genealogy of thinking around religion and the same demarcation between religion and public life. And while some scholars and anthropologists have understood the necessity of actually integrating theological parameters in ethnographic religious studies, for example, there's still a debate, an ongoing debate of how that integration should happen, how it could be achieved in a most fruitful manner. Because again, in this epistemology in religious studies, the field has been sort of stigmatized by what used to be a confessionalist approach to religious studies whereby the theorist experience with Western Christianity sort of dictated how they approached other religious systems. And so there is this fear that once you engage with theology, you will succumb to the same confessionalist tendencies. However, again, I argue that one should decolonize themselves from these fears, because again, they're informed and grounded very much in Western epistemology. So we need another way to engage with theology that is actually relevant to the society as we deal with. And finally, in gender and religious studies, specifically a subfield of religious studies, most of the gender lens that is being used as an analytical framework is informed primarily about what is known as a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, which traces to Western feminist critiques of biblical traditions in these societies. And so there is a tendency actually for any religious tradition that seems to be patriarchal or have similarities with what is considered patriarchal Western Christianity to be considered inherently sexist, hierarchical, and pernicious to women. So there isn't really an openness, although there have been critical thinkers in this field who have suggested a more phenomenological approach, which actually find inadequate, and I suggest something a bit more different. But generally the field lacks this reflexivity, especially when they deal with Christianity that are not Western Christianity. So Eastern Christianity, Oriental Orthodox Christianity, and so forth. So the approach that I'm suggesting and that I sort of applied by doing the research in Aksum, in Ethiopia, following this approach, I essentially combated as a feminist epistemologist with feminist epistemologies and approaches in religious studies to propose a theology-informed participatory ethnographic approach that pays due attention to the process of linguistic and cultural translation in view of the personal identity of the researcher. So the attempt was to do a multi-dimensional study that accounted for all these parameters simultaneously while making my subjectivity and my biases apparent and challenge those throughout the research process. And first and foremost, the study used the gender-sensitive approach that suspended preconceiving gender, what gender might mean and how gender relations should be defined, religion or domestic violence and actually worked from within the discourses of the participants, how they understood these concepts, how they invoked, you know, different other concepts to speak around these themes. And I paired, again, aware of the colonial legacies of anthropology as a field, I paired the ethnographic study with the participatory workshops that I mentioned, again, which follow a socratic dialogical approach. So it's about me acting as a, someone who asks questions really in order to learn and to understand as opposed to telling people what to think or to say. And that meant in the book, and as you'll see especially in chapter two, discussing thoroughly the process of language learning, engaging with local languages, communication challenges and how the research communication happened, the framing of the questions and also discussing biases of subjectivity and how those were dealt with in the research process. And finally, as I said, a theology informed analysis of the local religious tradition that approaches the local religious system in its historical context, understands how the insiders, whether theologians or clergy understand it and also juxtaposes this to the lived experience of the communities because these don't overlap. And I just wanted to read very quickly an excerpt from the book on this, quite telling. My decision to suspend definitions of gender, religion and conjugal abuse reflected a more fundamental problematization of the implicit base of Western logic dictating the production of universal definitions and theories. If the aim of theory is to understand issues in their local manifestations and to help to redress those. And given that each local context is uniquely configured and requires its own analytical framework without suggesting that non-local forces are played, the need for universal theory seems to become secondary. This is not to oppose cross-cultural theoretical exchanges or comparative studies from diverse contexts, but to redirect attention away from theory as an interrogated assumption or tell us in itself to theory as a means to an end that acquire substance in relation to a specific context and an objective informed by practical needs. In other words, my concern here is to problematize this idea of fundamental belief that there is value in theory itself, understanding that genetic theory capture the diversity of the world and help us understand the diversity of the world. So actually theory should always be guided by practical needs as informed by specific contexts. This is really at the heart of the argument of this book. So just before I end, I wanted to very briefly say something about the study in Aksum. The study in Aksum was instigated by the same tendencies in gender-based violence scholarship which replicate in this scholarship in Ethiopia, but also by reports that significant numbers of men and women across the country justified life-hitting in some gendered situations. For example, when the woman neglected the children or she left the house without the permission of the husband and so forth, although the percentages have declined over time. And the lack of studies to actually contextualize these attitudes. Having an Eastern Orthodox background which I will mention in the next slide, I was quite curious how, for example, a society like Aksum embedded in this Ethiopian Orthodox Taha tradition that teaches about loving relationship and peaceful relationships in marriage could actually tolerate these attitudes. How could Orthodox believers have this kind of attitude? That was my question, which is a fair question to ask. And I just wanted to contextualize these attitudes and understand them from within the local religious cultural context. And there was also in the studies that I saw very little engagement with religious tradition and again, a tendency to consider that religious parameters were negative. Again, because the church was presented as a hierarchical institution and hence because the church is hierarchical, then the experience with the religious tradition must have been negative for all that assumption and to problematize that assumption. And so through the present, what I do in the book, I present in your ethnographic realities around marriage and religious living that integrates, again, is embedded in the history of the region and the history of the country as much as possible and is theologically informed. So the study engaged closely with a list of holy texts and canonical texts that are considered fundamental in this tradition. I have a list, I think I haven't put it out, but it's in the book. And working with the community, combining that with an ethnographic study with the communities, with two village communities in Aksum and a shorter period of time in the city of Aksum to understand how people thought about conjugal abuse realities and to understand their attitudes and how their attitudes were informed by their religious cultural background and context, specifically in relation to their faith tradition as well. And I wanted to stand a bit on my relationship to the study community. One of the things I say in the preface as coming from a decolonial perspective is that I did not select Ethiopia as an academic project in order to build a career for myself, which is a tendency that I see happening. The objectives of this book were informed by my own worldview and the contingencies of my life. Ethiopia presented many religious and historical commonalities with my countries of origin and residence. And I felt connected to the country. I felt that I had a common language with the people. And obviously when you do ethnographic research, you have to have that bridge to create trust and to be able to access people's worldviews in some way to some extent. My family and I immigrated from Aldova to Greece after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both Moldova and Greece follow an Eastern Orthodox worldview. So I'm raised in this background and belief system. In Ethiopia, ancient Christianity was officially embraced as a state religion in the fourth century after the arrival of Greek speaking, Saint-Fermencius, who became the first patriarch of Ethiopia. And it was consolidated in the fifth century with the arrival of the nine saints, Tershuatika Dussan, Inam Haareg, where Syrian and Roman monks who came from various provinces of the Roman Empire at the time. Also Ethiopia like Greece, well, Ethiopia unlike other African countries is skewed colonization, but it lived through an Italian occupation in the late 1930s just as Greece did in the early 1940s with Mussolini's expansionist politics at the time. So obviously there were a lot of many commonalities in terms of the religious tradition, historical background and sort of people's, the importance that the religious tradition seemed to have for people's own identities and historical conscience. So my concern was really to contribute, to identify my comparative advantage really, given my positionality, given who I am, what can I do and how can I do it reflexively so that I can actually contribute something to this literature that can actually achieve to give a more nuanced presentation of the realities on the ground. So where can I use my knowledge of Eastern Orthodox theology for example, in order to contribute to the change of discourse in this field. And I wanted to read another excerpt again because I think positionality is very, very important. And this regards my own role, I say at the end of the book, as it was demonstrated in Aksum, the majority of the lay population was not versed in Orthodox dogmatics or exegesis, but they understood the fundamental premises of their faith and they knew and tried to embody the standards such as by trying to cultivate a moral and righteous character. Without prior exposure to church dogmatics and teachings, it is unlikely that I would make sense of my interlocutor's discourses in the way that I did. My background as an Eastern Orthodox woman was undoubtedly important for accessing my interlocutor's worldviews around the human personality and gender identity. The inevitable assumptions that I had as a result of my religious experience did not prove irreversibly harmful, provided that I reflected on and challenged these throughout the research process, abandoning them where they were irrelevant. My experience stresses the importance of making the workings of personal identity as transparent as feasible throughout the research process and its presentation. So as you see, I've tried to be very honest about the limitations and challenged them throughout. And just to break the monotony before I finalize with my last slide, a bit of photographic material from Aksum, this is an interview with Amonk at a nearby monastery. This is the compound I spent about six months in one of the villages that I was stationed in. I lived with a female who actually braided hair for other women in the village. So women would visit constantly and that provided me a very secure environment to build trust with women and to speak to them. But of course, the research involved both men and women and clergy. Use the coffee ceremony to create and not only to practice language speaking, to create context for communication, sort of win some time with people because the coffee ceremony takes time. There are three rounds in the coffee serving for anyone who knows. So that was really a tool for trying to build communication with people, especially with males. So the males tended to not drink coffee outside of their homes and with a female that wasn't their wife. So that was a limitation. This is an interview I conducted with a male, a soldier in his home. So this is the inside of the compounds, very modest as you can see. This is me coming back one evening from a religious gathering, which were very regular in the local society almost, I think in one month I attended about 11 of them. And this is a marriage, the holy matrimony, the sacrament of the holy matrimony being performed in St. Mary of Zion in Axum city, which is performed only for virginal couples, very early in the morning, very ceremoniously. And so I wanted to finish with the main insights of this ethnographic study. For those who may not have the time to go in depth, what the study really showed was really the complexity of how gender parameters and religious parameters and domestic violence interface and the necessity to take a context-specific approach, such as the one I attempted to take in this study. So very, very roughly the society had a number of gender asymmetries and gendered factors that contributed to a tolerance perhaps, or even some situations of abusiveness in the marital relationship. Normative arrangements and expectations around the critical relationship, such as that the man should act as a breadwinner and the female should always be in charge of the household and that when the man failed to act as a breadwinner, then that would lead to conflict and that could lead to abuse and so forth. The expectation that the wife should always meet the husband's sexual needs and not the other way round and that was associated with sexual querciveness, the idea that the wife should always be timid to hook into greener and non-confrontational at all times. And then more institutionalized tolerance in the police and the social courts that didn't really follow up when reports of domestic violence were made and women's secretiveness around the phenomenon. So obviously there were these gender parameters that were very strong and important. However, there was also a plurality of norms and attitudes that actually contradicted visible gender symmetries and pernicious attitudes towards women, including religious values, emphasizing mutual help, respect and righteousness, neighborly interference to stop violence and even societal sanctions sometimes by the church and by the priests to criticize the perpetrator for immorality or non-Christian behavior when they were abusive or were misbehaving. The most important is that many people in the local society, they differentiated between their focal culture, what they call Bahel, and the religious tradition as they understood it, Haimanot. And they criticized, they thought, many thought and many understood that the actual cultural culture and the folklore traditions had deviated slightly from the religious tradition and were not always in line with the religious tradition. However, at the same time, what seemed to happen is that the, again, people still sort of invoked the religious tradition in order to justify their practices and every time they deviate, if they try to make a change or to change something, they risk being considered deviant or heretical. So there was a suspicion in general in this society about any change, any departure from the norm and religious legacy. And so that gave the illusion that many of these parts continued as a religious factors, but the picture was actually much more complex. So obviously, overall, the study shows the need for remedial interventions that, you know, as other scholars have argued, you know, more awareness, more education for women, better legislation and so forth. But at the same time, any intervention has to be religious culturally sensitive. It needs to understand not only how religious beliefs play into people's behavior, but also how religious discourses oftentimes invoked by the lay to themselves to justify practices and norms and how then the religious theology, orthodox theology, especially the New Testament theology that departs from some of the Old Testament heritage of the local culture, can become resourceful in this process. I can't go in detail, but the book speaks, you know, in very much detail about the discourses of the clergy, what they taught, how the lay to receive those teachings. Most of these teachings were, again, informed by the Old Testament heritage of this tradition because the same heritage was very much valued in the culture. So the clergy responded to the lay to needs and expectations because they were afraid that if they changed something, they would be considered protestantizing as pente, which is considered, is threatening to many orthodox clergy and believers currently, since, you know, there is this idea that most protestant people are coming, you know, are proselytized from the orthodox indigenous population. So there were many dynamics very specific to this context that need to be considered for any intervention that aims to be religious culturally sensitive and aims to work with the clergy together and the lady to change attitudes and behaviors and address these dynamics. And I thought I'll end with this interesting sign from Aksum University. I found it on the campus of Aksum University. It says, it is a sin to believe that every woman is not equal to man, which I think demonstrates in practice the, you know, the necessity and the resourcefulness of speaking in the language and the discourse of the community in order to communicate these very important messages. And to end with some acknowledgement, some sorry Lars. I just wanted to thank, you know, obviously my three supervisors, Dr. Erica Hunter, Dr. Jörg Haasstein and Dr. Kole Haris who all advised aspects of this project and challenged me to think, you know, beyond my preconceptions and my initial motivations, it wouldn't have happened without their distinct support. The funding support from various parties, the excellent tutorial services, Integriña and Guz by Dr. Ralph Lee and Verhane Wolder-Gaffriel. I should also mention Josef Mengistu who is in this call who allowed me to be in his class of Amharic. Thank you so much, Josef, I miss again a lot. Addis Mesrette and Dr. Mulgetta Berry who at Addis Ababa University, Aksum University who allowed me to, you know, get the affiliation paperwork done and be able to do this research. And importantly, research assistance, translators and transcribers. Obviously, I had to learn the different languages and use them myself to achieve confidentiality in the interviews that I conducted, but in the very early months I used, you know, employed assistants and transcribers and translators to support me in that process. Everyone, you know, deserves huge acknowledgements. Abraheed Kebra-Medhin, Kebra-Nagash, Pizzum-Tere-Dai. I don't have the family names. Ume-Conan-Heben-Goy-Tum. I can't see the other one. Cherkose, Esetika Bede and Rawa Yamane. So these are primarily students. Some of them are instructors in Aksum University who all had an important contribution to make. And of course the families in Aksum, I know they can't hear us, but I will be back soon so I can tell them in person. And all the residents in the villages who, you know, were patients and open-minded and after allow me to live with them and to give me the time and energy to do this research. And shout out to my mother, Larissa, my father Ili and my brother Dennis who, you know, supported me financially. It was a, these were very difficult years for me. And Erika might be able to say a word about that. And I wouldn't have made it without my family and their personal sacrifices. So thank you so much. I'll pass the word to Erika. Thank you. Erika, are you there? Hi. Hello, yes. Hello, Ramina. And Ramina has given us an admirable survey of what she did up until she came to SOAS. And of course the book is the product of the years she spent at SOAS. I think she arrived in 2015. And of course the book is a product of those rich years of research. Now, when one interviews a doctoral student, one looks for certain qualities and one is commitment. And Ramina showed this in absolute abundance. And if I was going to describe Ramina's qualities, it would be three eyes. She was intrepid. How many African nations, I'm sure she sat on the back of dusty buses. If I know African travel, she was intrepid. She's been investigative and she's shown enormous initiative. And this isn't just physically, but she's shown it in her metaphysical application. Her in a way being a little bit of an iconoclast in breaking the norms of the gender bias that she has said that has been so prevalent and also the disinclination to understand the role that religion or faith plays in the society she has studied. So she has listened and she has learned from the people whom she spent so much time interviewing. And I know how hard Ramina worked under very difficult and rudimentary circumstances. And that is also a sign of a scholar who is completely committed to her research. And of course she has produced not only a brilliant thesis, which passed with no corrections from her two very distinguished examiners, but also now a very brilliant book which I am sure will have a great impact in the field. Zoas's motto has been, we like students to think outside the box. And Ramina has done this in her work. I hope that she will open with her new fabulous funding as a future leaders fellow. And I don't think it even has to be future. She is a leaders fellow. So she will open a new trajectory. And that is one of the great pleasures of being a doctoral supervisor. Now I am not an expert on development. I live in Norfolk, so that speaks all about development. But I understood where Ramina was coming from in feeling a community and understanding what its norms are and trying to convey that to a larger world. So all I can say is it was the greatest of pleasure to have Ramina as a doctoral student and my fellow supervisor, Dr. Horstein. I'm sure would echo such sentiments and she is a true credit to scholarship. Thank you. Thank you very much, Erika. I should also say that it's a great honor for me to actually follow in your footsteps because this is of course the second, well, re-election that it's not just an introduction to a very well-crafted book and the crowning of a PhD period. It's also the continuation of the Center for World Christianity because we're talking about a manifestation of a religious system, Christianity, in a part of the world where it's actually been at home since the very beginning. So this is not just one of the facets of Christianity. It's actually the, we're going to the roots of Christianity. Yes, so I could say much, much more, but I think actually our wonderful 40 plus participants should get the chance to pose their questions and their comments to both Ramina and Emma. I promised to be quiet until the very end, but I just had a question to Emma at the very beginning, namely how important you think the actual definition of religion is in what you said, because you were very eloquent in pointing out the tradition within Western academia, which puts the developing world into a certain box, so to speak. And I just wonder whether what you said could be applied differently if one of the decisive factors is religion rather than an ideological concept or rather than a political set of beliefs. So could you just define how you see religion in your own work? Well, that's a huge, huge question. I think definitions of religion are really significant to the way that development now engages with religion. And I think there's been a really big tendency to engage with religion as though it's mostly about beliefs, as though it's mostly about texts, as though the real authorities are the religious leaders. And again, this all points to this tendency to not engage with the local and not to take practices and embodiment and local knowledge, the knowledge of women who aren't represented in the public as significant in what we mean by religion. So I don't think in my own work I have one definition of religion. It depends on the particular focus that I have in the particular thing that I'm working on, but I think it's absolutely crucial for how development is engaged with religion. It's a very westernized, Christianized, belief-focused understanding of religion, yeah. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. So I'll be quiet now and we're taking questions and they can go both to, probably more to Romina, but to both of our speakers. The way it works, you have to unmute yourself. I think I've given you the authority to do so. And then you simply speak, but we, yes. Anyone who would like to ask a question? Yes, John Bins, yes. Thank you. Well, a question, Romina, really. Looking quite specifically about looking at your work within the Tigrian villages, did you have one of the structures that seems to be quite important in Ethiopian church societies, the Mahabharat. And this enables groups, you know, that the church is function, such as organizations or parishes, but there's quite small informed community groups and often these are gender specific. I've attended on many occasions local groups of entirely women Mahabharat, which is quite an important group which were given in empowerment and a voice to women in communities. I wonder if this was something which was significant in your own experience in the Aksumite communities. So, John, the Mahabharat, I would think of the religious Mahabharat, so the regular gathering to venerate saints, for example, and other religious celebrations. Or do you mean associations of women's that are rural, those existed? And also associations such as the Edir, right, for funeral support and various other functions. And do you want to clarify before I answer? I think it well could include all of those, but I mean, I've, for example, attended a number of times groups which would be attached to a church. It might be say a group of a dozen or so women who would meet once around the different houses, but the fact that they would meet together in a religious context did give a kind of the opportunity for identity in the place in society which seemed quite significant in their lives in defining their gender role, their role in society as sort of, one of your sort of local religiously specific. Yes, I think this clarifies. So all village communities now have a women's association where presumably these aim to communicate women's issues to the world office, though higher up administration and then the regional level and the state level. So it's really about creating those pathways or conduits to ensure that women's issues are properly reported and addressed, you know, within the state machinery. The thing with these women's associations, I try, I work through the women's association because I was trying to build relationships of trust with a segment of the population. And this was seemed to be the most pragmatic way to move forward and discreetly. There was a lot of politics involved in the women's association, various antagonisms, various hostilities because although the secretary of the women's association wasn't paid, Romini rated for her role, she was a rainbow to travel to the city into being the trainings and the meetings that were organized at the red level. So there was a lot of rumors and a lot of antagonisms around the secretaries in particular because some were thought to have lied to get that position and people didn't have faith in the secretary. And if the faith in the secretary was lost then the whole thing sort of fell apart. That was one phenomenon I saw. And I don't think that in the rural areas, at least in my experience and what I heard from the testimonies of the different female interlocutors, that they felt that they had that unity as females in society. Again, because there were all sorts of other parameters that created sort of awkward dynamics between people, gossip, political, politics, histories, family histories, antagonisms of all sorts. So in the rural community, these things are very important. Gossip is very important. People are very aware of it and they try to stay away from it. And that really determines the relationships of people. In the cities in contrast, I think these kinds of associations are stronger and more resourceful. So I spent a lot of time in Aksum City with the Mahabharika Dusan, the Sunday school department of the church. And the women had their own group and the males had their own group. And then they also met together. They seem to be very active. They seem to share a common ground and understanding. But again, these tended to be women who had a different level of awareness and a different relationship to their faith, right? They're very faithful women, but at the same time they demanded equality as they understood their faith and advocated and taught. So they were of a certain mentality that they had in common. And you didn't see the commonality in the rural communities to the same extent. So I think there is potential and resourcefulness, but there were definitely differences between the rural and the urban context. Thank you. No worries. Thank you. More questions here. There is one last by Gillian, I think. He raised his hand. Yes, I did. Thank you very much. Maybe because I can't look at how she used the chat at the moment. I've had a very interesting and thank you very much for your presentation and the work that you've done on that, Ramin. But I spent quite a long time working in Africa, though not at the level that you did at Dan and the community. Would you say that part of the issue for the very, very different concepts and ideas that are going on from village to village community to community is due to the fact you rarely find a pure version of religion. I didn't find in West Africa, in Southern Africa, Central Africa, there have been people who were really a pure Christian or a pure Muslim or a pure anything. They had mixed in to their religious belief and understanding long held traditions and cultures that predated any of the major religions. Although that was what part of the context was that we should understand and so on. Now, I'll just ask you about that. Yeah, it's a fair observation. I think most of the literature that exists that is ethnographic and the literature on religion and development, suggesting mostly syncretistic systems, as you suggest, Gillian, an authoritative religious tradition that is sort of embedded in a wider focal belief system. And he might sort of combine beliefs that are not necessarily, they don't necessarily trace to theology or religious teaching, but they're still considered part of the wider religious tradition heritage. In Tigray, perhaps a bit differently than on Harah region in Ethiopia, my interlocutors didn't refer too much on the Tsar spirit beliefs and the Buddha, the evil eye and various other sort of beliefs that exist in the local society. And I didn't want to impose that. I wanted to let the interlocutors invoke it if they thought it was relevant. But when they did speak about these spirit, spiritual forces, right? They always trace them to the arch enemy of Christ Satan. So they still placed it and understood it very much theologically. There is a spiritual war fought between evil and good. All these spiritual forces, whether instigated by human evilness, jealousy or whatever other emotion or by demonic forces, they still fall under very much Satan's hatred for humanity, right? The child of God. So I think it's really how you want to see it. I would think in most orthodox societies and Eastern Christianity's people wouldn't necessarily think in terms of pure religion necessarily. I think again, there is a bit, one has to be aware of the fact that our conceptualization of religion is very much informed by a certain conceptualization we have in this context. For many people, it's about the wider worldview. As long as you follow the wider worldview and understanding and the basic premises, everything else can be combined under it. And it doesn't mean necessarily deviation from the true faith, right? So it's not necessarily a text-based literalist or very demarcated approach to one's religious tradition. It's much more fluid, much more dynamic, much more vernacular, right? It's very much vernacular. It's informed by people's own experiences. And since religion or faith is so important, is a belief system that offers people answers, when they have experiences that cannot be explained through common sense, then they will resort to their religious belief system to try and make sense of it, right? So I think the life itself sort of instigates or forces them to understand the religious belief system in a much wider way, I guess. So yes, I think we see it as syncretistic, but the communities themselves wouldn't necessarily see it in the same way. That would be my comment. Thank you. Romina, I have a question to you. Although I made a vow to be quite silent, but when you talk about this religious vernacularity, vernacular, well, this syncretistic tendency, do you include the Muslim communities that you visited? Is that the same, do you have the same observation there? That's an interesting question. I wouldn't want to make conclusive statements, again, because my research with the Muslim Sufi community I spent time with was much more limited. It wasn't as grounded. And also because the Sufi Muslim community doesn't necessarily represent all Muslim communities and Sunni Shia traditions, they're very much different depending on the tradition they follow, the context and how the tradition developed in each context. It's very different. I think one cannot generalize. However, for the context I worked in in Senegal, in Puto del Toro, yes, definitely there were all sorts of beliefs and this discourse about what is culture and what is religion was equally pertinent there. So a lot of people would simply, and by the way, this is a Sufi tradition. So they will follow the teachings of a certain leader of the brotherhood, right? So anyone who felt that anyone departed from the teachings or the life of that leader whom they venerate, then they could say that that's not what, that's not what the faith is about. So it was kind of very subjective to some extent, right? It was very subjective and there was an ongoing debate amongst my interlocutors of what is l'interprétation près because we spoke in French. What is the right interpretation? And people had different sort of arguments. And then interestingly, the people I spoke to in Dakar, in the capital of Senegal, they followed, they didn't follow the brotherhood, the specific, the Tijania, the Tijania brotherhood that I was doing work with. They followed, I believe, it was the Sunni tradition, but I can't remember which tradition I don't want to lie. And they were, essentially, when I started to talk to them and ask them, well, what do you think about their tradition and what they believe? They would just try to negate it to me, to show me that it's the wrong belief that they're following. So there was, as I said, there are multiple understandings, multiple traditions. It's really important to understand that context. And as I argue that one shouldn't conflate the vernacular, the lived religious tradition of the people as they understand it, with the tradition they claim to follow because that tradition that they claim to follow can probably be traced to certain teachings or texts or exegesis, but that exegesis doesn't necessarily reflect how people know it. And yet people will invoke it in order to justify their practices, even when they're innovations. And interestingly enough, in Aksum, people who thought reflectively about even the drinking, drinking alcohol as a religious gathering, a lot of clergy told me that previously, the norm was to drink milk, not alcohol. Now the norm is to drink alcohol and both the clergy and the lady have to drink alcohol as an indication of hospitality. So when the host offers them sewer, the traditional beer, then they must drink it. They can't refuse it out of politeness and so forth. Although many people know that this drinking alcohol is an innovation, the majority will insist that this is how the religious tradition is in their context. And that by invoking the religious tradition, they kind of justify their unwillingness to change it. And they don't take responsibility of the consequences. A lot of drinking at the Mahabbar was related to men picking arguments with other men or going back home and being abusive with wives and children. And when I asked the community to sort of think about it and what would the solution be then in this case, I would challenge them to sort of think, they would say, well, our faith allows one to drink, but to a measure, if they drink excessively, it's their responsibility. It's the individual's responsibility. It's not the society's responsibility. You see, so it's really important to understand, again, how religious idiom is invoked in people's own discourse, but also to understand that some people are not naive. Sometimes they use the religious discourse in order to justify and put their conscience at ease when they really know that that's not what the religious tradition is teaching, right? So we shouldn't look at people as naive, but people are multidimensional, they're intelligent, they have incentives, they have emotions. They think, as we do, sometimes with their self-interest in mind, and we need to understand all these dynamics which are very, very, very complex. Just tagging on to this, I actually just, I only just realized that Mohamed Gamal has put the message onto the system, and he asked something very similar, but with more, with a greater focus on the gender issue, the gender relations issue. So I wonder whether you could answer Mohamed in that. So good to see you. I also saw Barbara from the Ginko Library. So Mohamed and I are part of a circle of scholars, divinity scholars in the UK and Egypt, and essentially we collaborate in interreligious studies, interfaith dialogue. So Mohamed is one of my colleagues. Great to see you here, Mohamed. I didn't, so the book is not about my previous research in Senegal, I have a paper on that, but I do refer back to it to build the argument and the approach, right? Because that obviously informed it. However, in the previous research I conducted, essentially what the research showed is again that the way women and men understand gender roles, and again, this is a very traditional society where women are in charge of the household, the children, they're not supposed to work at all, men should be the breadwinners. So it's a very traditional society and the way the gender relations are understood are very much grounded in people's religious tradition. So there was a lot on the side of men when I spoke to them, young men actually, who would say the role of the woman, the woman should walk behind the husband, dernier, as they would say it in French. So she should always sort of, here, she should always consult her husband. Her husband is really the authority in that relationship. Then the women would say, well, that is the wrong interpretation because the men are not well educated, they don't really understand what the faith is teaching. And again, there was a lot of sort of debate which is the right interpretation. But in general, everyone did not necessarily challenge gender norms. They understood that the faith teaches that there should be distinct gender norms. What they would challenge is when these gender norms were used to perpetuate gender asymmetries. So both the females were very critical and the males were very reflective and reflexive of these issues. They understood that change needed to happen in the gender relations locally, but then they didn't do it in a way that would abandon their faith or would subvert their faith, right? Or would subvert fundamental teachings of the faith. And this is a very interesting component because again, it shows that no matter how willing people are to change and no matter how well they see the problem, the solution still needs to be very much embedded in their worldview. It cannot disregard their worldview, right? The solution has to come from within their worldview. I hope this answers the question. I just realized that we're precisely on time. I don't know whether Zoom will cut us off. It's a, it's migrated to SOAS, to the SOAS account. I think it's become more flexible, but when I used it as a private account, it was very strict. Anyway, yes? Before you finish, could I just say, I wanted to say to everyone that I am delighted to hand the button of the convener ship, which I also shared with Dr. Horstein, who's part of here, to Lars. It's great that the center continues at SOAS, which of course has been rather traumatic in terms of its teaching of Christianity, but that we have the center continuing is great. And of course, the support that you are all showing is great and long may it continue under Lars stewardship. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, but I mean, what you said about SOAS is all too true. I mean, we, if you knew how close we were to actually being phased out of existence, you would perhaps sit there with a different, I'm sitting here with a great sense of gratitude that was somehow survived, but I don't think we should take anything for granted. That's one aspect that was very badly hit was the teaching of languages. And especially in your presentation, you emphasized the usefulness of actually being able to communicate with local populations. It's a, if I can just use that sign in the end, it's a sin to cut languages and for any university. And I think the sooner we can try to reverse this the better, but I mean, the times we live in are quite extraordinary, but I think we should keep our heads firmly screwed on when we take important decisions. And this is something that is probably not just going to pass with the illness itself, the COVID phenomenon. This will continue for a number of years. This is a challenge. Lars, may I just say that Adisa had a question. He has a raised hand and I wonder if we have any questions. Absolutely. If Adisa is still with us, if he hasn't left. Yes, Solomina. Thank you. Hello, Adisa. Just to raise the question of how you use the term patriarchy because many Ethiopian or Turkic scholars argue that the use of this term is not proper. And there is also another issue where women are also taken as responsible for some of the abusive violence of men. Did you discover anything on that? Yes. I will use the term patriarchy. I find it very problematic in the way it's understood in Western scholarship. I mean, I would understand it perhaps as a model whereby the male is the main decision maker and has the authority. But just because there is a patriarchal model doesn't mean that the gender relationships cannot be to some extent egalitarian because it depends on what kind of relationship and arrangement the wife and husband have. So you might have a family that seems quite patriarchal in the sense of the male is making all the decisions and so forth, but when you go into the family and live with them, you see that actually the woman has more decision-making power. And so I didn't use this term at all. And again, because the way I approached this research, Adisa, was to use the terminology that people used. Patriarchy was not a terminology used in the villages. It might be used by some feminist movements and women's activists in a disababa. Perhaps by Eula, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association or CETAWIT, the more recent feminist movement established in 2014 that self-identified as feminist. But most people are cautious not to use this terminology because they can be misinterpreted by the local communities and stakeholders. In terms of female abusiveness, yes, indeed, a lot of people spoke about cases where women had been the abuser. They knew by name people who, you know, these situations and case studies. They had this expression kufwe, which means bad in Tigrinya and they would say bad women or bad men. And bad women tend to be, again, women who either did not meet their spousal expectations. They did not really behave as the wife should. Or they were very controlling or speaking back very confrontational and disrespectful. These were sort of some of the understandings. But also there were cases of actual crimes and violent acts committed by women, in particular one where a woman divorced her husband and then her new partner and she returned and attacked her husband. And I think threw him into a ditch. He didn't die. He was saved. But then they were awaiting the court sentence at the time when I was in the village. So there are, you know, there are a lot of violent acts that happen by the genders. It's not one way or the other, but of course one needs to understand the story behind this, right? It's not that simple. So yes, it was, you know, violent was not associated with anyone gender exclusively, but there was a tendency to tolerate perhaps more violent behavior by the men because they were considered a bit more inherently violent as opposed to women. And again, it had to do with the cultural expectation that women should be timid, tohut, and non-confrontational. So by nature, women were expected to be, you know, very timid and modest and peaceful, you know. And so I think there was this tolerance of women violent, men's violence and not so much of women's violence when they became violent, right? So it was considered even more out of the ordinary, I guess. I hope this answers the questions that they said. Thank you. Yes, and this would be the same in Western civilization. This would be the same now if a woman is caught, you know, killing her own children, maybe because of psychological distress or whatever, the newspapers will not shut up about it, but you know, how many men have done the same. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is all, I just wanted to thank everyone on my behalf if that's okay, Lars. Thank you all. It's been over the one hour. I had suggested one hour initially, but you can never keep these things to one hour. Thank you all for showing up for your support. It's been a pleasure to knowing most of you really. I recognize most of the names, you know, colleagues from the research office. It's great to see you, people from the scholarly networks I'm in, and you know, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. And I do hope you have a chance to read the e-book, which is much more affordable. Please send in comments anytime. Yes, yes. Also, well, thank you enormously, Romina, but also my gratitude to Emma Tomelin, who's put a lot of coherent thought into the background to this. Well, it was a lecture actually based on your book and what I would like you to do in collectively as the center members, and those members who are not center members because of course this went out through event bright and then various channels. If you're interested, do take a look at the center website, which I only just was able to access as an administrator. So I'm going to put on a few sessions, hopefully a good few sessions over the coming weeks, which will deal with Christianity within the setting of religions and societies in the present and in the past. So there are different takes on this and you're most welcome to participate. So I'm going to, I should have said this actually at the beginning, but I wrote it into the chat that this session has been recorded. The clip will be made available on YouTube, on the YouTube channel that we have, and I'll be sending out the link to all of you once this has been done. Apologies, I should have mentioned because I know the book is very expensive and I know that Ethiopians usually don't have access to credit card. If anyone wants the book or wants the PhD, for example, that I could share, I'm happy to do that in person. Just send me an email. If the book isn't accessible to you, I'm very happy to facilitate that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much to all of you. Thank you. Bye everyone. Take care. I'm going to let you know. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye.