Julia Gallagher will give a talk at the University of Addis Ababa on 8 May 2023.
The talk is called ‘The invisible state? How Ethiopians read the state through its buildings’.
It is about how citizens experience and think about their state through its buildings.
It is based on Julia’s focus group discussion work in Addis Ababa with 90 people in 2020. The groups discussed the country’s ‘most important public buildings’ which often seem to be ‘invisible’.
In the talk Julia will try to make sense of this, to discuss broader ideas about invisibility and power and what the relationship between the two means for how Ethiopians understand and engage with their state.
See other project work on Ethiopia:
The histories buildings tell: aesthetic and popular readings of state meaning in Ethiopia, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2022
‘Pan-Africanism and the affective charges of the African Union Building in Addis Ababa’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2021