8.02 Katrin Bromber; Julian Tadesse
Taming contingency anticipating progress: Ethiopian youth’s attempts to carve out a future
The panel starts from the assumption that notions of progress are always inherently ambivalent and multivocal because a number of factors affecting the outcome of such projects may not be amenable to control or may engender unexpected dynamics and events. In other words, progress as an idea and project of social transformation is essentially contingent. Chance, fortuity, unexpectedness, uncertainty, happenstance and incident are some of the related terms which come to mind. In social and historical analysis, contingency refers, broadly speaking, to the open-ended or partially uncontrollable nature of events and human experience. The contingent may appear, on the one hand, as an intractable element of disturbance or insecurity whose elimination is vital for the pursuit of progress. This often leads to concrete anticipations of the future as radical ways of taming chance and reducing uncertainty. On the other hand, contingency may be viewed under a more positive light as a way of brokering unexpected and novel possibilities especially in situations marked by impasse or by positive perceptions of risk and chance. The panel invites contributions which address from an historical as well as from a contemporary perspective questions such as: How does contingency feature not simply in the implementation but also in the formulation of ideas of progress? To what extent does anticipation inform structured contact by young people with the present so that it spirals into self-fulfilling prophecies? In how far does ‘youth’, projected as the embodied connection between present and future, become object of an ‘attempted anthropogenesis’ by actual physical and social practices such as youth movements, educational programs or sports clubs?
ACCEPTED PAPERS
| Mr | COSTANTINI Osvaldo | Individual progress and the construction of Pentecostal “self”: the role of Ethiopian Pentecostal churches in Rome (Italy) |
| Mr | EGELAND Erik K. E. | Negotiating uncertainty; hopes of the future among Christian youth in the Sidaama |
| Dr. | MAINS Daniel | Youth, infrastructural development, and contingent futures in Ethiopian cities |
| Dr. | NUNZIO Marco di | Embracing Uncertainty: Young people on the move in inner city Addis Ababa |
| Prof. | SCHIRRIPA Pino | Pentecostalism and Youthness. Pentecostal pedagogies, neoliberal individual and development in Tigray |
| Mr | TADESSE Julian | Turning ‘job-seekers’ into ‘job-creators’ - Entrepreneurship Training in Ethiopia |