2023 OSA Annual Conference – Call for Papers

                                                “Constructing the Future: Authoritarianism and the Quest for Oromo Sovereignty”

The 2023 OSA conference takes up a theme that is timely on a global scale, highlighting and exploring the immense potential contained in the vibrant cultural values, practices of resource management and historic legacies that were silenced and violently suppressed at the time of conquest and colonization during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The experience of the Oromo and other nations and peoples who were forcibly brought into the Ethiopian empire fits the same pattern of subjugation as peoples conquered militarily and directly colonized by European powers, yet it has gone unrecognized as such. Although an “Ethiopianist” interpretation – which claims 3000 years of shared history of the peoples in this region – has dominated the scholarship of Ethiopia, empirical evidence is to the contrary. The conference theme presumes that values developed by independent nations constitute an immense reservoir of societal knowledge and environmental wisdom available for constructing a collective future and thus deserves scholarly examination. Read more