Jeylan Wolyie Hussein’s research while affiliated with Haramaya University and other places

This study examines the development of career aspirations among young people, focusing on how socio-cultural norms and values shape these aspirations and how rural youth view agriculture and rural life as a livelihood option. The study was conducted in pastoral and agropastoral areas of Ethiopia using a qualitative case study approach.. The study findings reveals that youth aspiration formation is deeply embedded within a complex sociocultural and institutional frameworks, as well as the role expectations as defined by society. Additionally, it highlighted that young men’s and women’s career perceptions and aspirations in agriculture are dynamic processes shaped by changing social norms, environmental factors, personal characteristics and traits, policy contexts, and inter-generational relations. The study challenges dominant policy narratives that portray youth mobility as an ego-centric and impromptu pursuit and equates it with permanent abandonment of agriculture and rural life. Instead, it highlights that the youth mobility into, out of, or return to agriculture and rural areas is often a livelihood strategy consciously employed in response to environmental vagaries, conflict, resource constraints and other socio-economic factors. This understanding underscores the need for policies that recognize youth agency and livelihood strategies. Key recommendations for enhancing youth programming in fragile environments include adopting participatory research approaches to understand the trajectories of youth aspirations, context specific appraoches that distiguished between male and female occupational goals, and tailored interventions that align with the context, aspirations and realiteis of youth in pastoral and argo-pastoral areas .

Background Childhood stunting and malnutrition condemn millions of people globally to a life of disadvantage and cognitive and physical impairment. Though increasing egg consumption is often seen as an important solution for low and middle income countries (including Ethiopia), emerging evidence suggests that greater exposure to poultry feces may also inhibit child growth due to the effects of enteric bacteria, especially Campylobacter, on gut health. Methods In this rapid ethnographic study, we explored village poultry production, child dietary practices, and environmental hygiene conditions as they relate to Campylobacter risk and intervention in 16 villages in Haramaya Woreda, Eastern Ethiopia. Results In the study area, we found that women assumed primary responsibility to care for both chickens and children: in feeding, housing, and healthcare. Most chickens were free-range local indigenous breeds, and flock sizes were small and unstable due to epidemics, seasonal trends, reproductive patterns, and lack of food. Generally, eggs were seen as “too luxurious” to be eaten, and were predominantly sold at local markets for scarce cash, despite high malnutrition rates. Local narratives of extreme poverty, social dietary norms, parental fatalism, and lack of “dietary consciousness” (as it was called) were invoked to explain this. We found that homesteads were highly contaminated with human and animal feces. Although community members viewed chicken feces and poultry gastrointestinal contents as particularly noxious in comparison to other animals because of their feeding behaviour, they did not relate them to any particular disease. Shared human-animal housing and childcare practices place children at high risk of exposure to enteric bacteria from animal manure, despite daily routines designed to manage the domestic landscape. Conclusions Addressing childhood stunting and malnutrition through egg production in rural landscapes like Haramaya must navigate three distinct health and care regimes: for children, chickens, and home environments. Interventions should be based on a holistic approach to social and economic empowerment, one that considers both women and men and integrates nutrition, health, and community change as its overarching goal.

In the effort to reemerge from the scourge of the genocide, Rwanda needs to adapt reliable reconstructive and re-integrative processes. Peace education programs are among the interventions that can help the effort toward interethnic reintegration. Peace education can help students rethink history, reframe memories and differences, reconsider narratives and myths that lead to interethnic rivalry, and reimagine ways of tackling sources of interethnic tensions. This article proposes Interethnic Contact and Integrative Peace Education Programs (ICIPEPs) to inspire reflection on and critical engagement with broader sociopolitical, ideological and historic-political issues in peace education classrooms in Rwandan universities. ICIPEPs is a broadly based, context-specific, and flexibly adaptable framework that promotes critical engagement and conscious understanding. The article discusses what peace and civic educators in Rwanda can and may need to do to ensure the contribution of ICIPEPs in peace building and societal reconstruction. The article underlines that though they need strong knowledge, pedagogical, theoretical, and value bases for participation in ICIPEPs, peace educators are expected to avail themselves to different demands and challenges by adapting reflective and engaged educational praxis.

Conflict over land is a serious social problem in rural Ethiopia. This paper analyses diverse challenges to managing land-related social conflicts in East Hararghe Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. The study was based on descriptive case analysis. The data required for the study were generated from a group of practitioners, government officers, elders, and community representatives through one-on-one interviews and focus group discussions. In addition, cases were selected and assessed. Inductive approach was used to generate meanings from the diverse data collected from the respondents and analysis of dynamic conflict cases. The study revealed that multiple social, cultural, economic, and institutional factors interact and affect smooth management of land-related social conflicts. The implication is that the effort to minimize the frequency as well as intensity of land-related conflicts in the study area should take into consideration the broader context within which conflicts occur and the processes that sustain their recurrence.

This article is an analysis and synthesis of the outcome of our efforts to integrate reflective problem-solving and mindfulness to promote organizational adaptation toward conflict-sensitive approach to managing and resolving land-related conflicts. The purpose of the article is 2-fold. The first part of the article describes the methodological and epistemological processes we followed to engage the candidates in reflective problem-solving and mindfulness. The second part of the article analyses the participants’ reflections on the meanings they had drawn from the thinking and learning processes. The article draws on transformative learning principles, principles of situated experiential learning, the notion of interactive problem-solving and social–psychological approach to conflict analysis, resolution, and negotiation. All of these principles and approaches emphasize the empowerment of learners and practitioners as agents of social transformation. At the end, the article presents the implications of our findings for future improvements.

The article sets out to examine the way the Hararghe Oromo in Ethiopia use their mirriiysa culture to express and cultivate criticality, mindfulness, interpersonal sensitivity and emotional intelligence. The paper discusses the nature of the performance culture and analyses the social psychological meanings of a set of mirriiysa texts collected from a group of folk performers who participated also in the interpretation and analysis of the cultural, social and psychological meanings of the texts. For theory, the study drew on interpretivism. During data analysis, the horizontal and vertical planes of analysis interacted and reinforced each other. The act of removing earwax symbolizes a cultural dimension of intersubjectivity and interaffectivity. The analyses indicated that mirriiysa is a socio-cultural performance wherein listening, understanding and responding occur in socially meaningful and interactive contexts. To understand the communicative intent of a mirriiysa text, one should take broader perspectives and pay due attention to the non-linguistic elements that offer the performance holistic import. The paper highlights the implication of these and other findings for our understanding of the meanings of mirriiysa and other genre performances.

The paper is an inquiry into the poetics of mourning and faith-based intervention in maladaptive grieving processes in Ethiopia. The paper discusses the ways loss is signified and analyses the meanings of ethno-cultural and psychospiritual practices employed to deal with maladaptive grief processes and their psychological and emotional after-effects. Hermeneutics provided the methodological framework and informed the analysis. The thesis of the paper is that the poetics of mourning and faith-based social interventions are interactionally based meaning making processes. The paper indicates the limitations of the study and their implications for further inquiry.

The article presents analysis of the epistemological, pedagogical and methodological processes and dilemmas that unfolded during our efforts to transform the conceptions and understandings of our participants’ thinking about ways of managing land-related conflicts. The paper reports our evaluation of the thinking and perspectives that guided our interventions and how we dealt with the situational challenges we encountered. It reports what we did to emerge out of the dilemmas we encountered in our efforts to help others think over and learn from their situations. The educative value of our efforts and encounters for other similarly situated practitioners and change agents will be stated at the end. We emphasise the educative potential of establishing links between contexts and thinking processes toward transformative and critical learning.

The paper sets out to offer social-psychological and phenomenological constructs of spirituality in the culture of dhikr in eastern Ethiopia at a micro-ethnography of faith based therapy (FBT). For analytical purpose, the paper draws on hermeneutics. This is the theory and method that places greater emphasis on the way humans deploy linguistic and cultural symbols to represent, organize and frame religion and other complex experiences. The paper focuses on how dhikr producers deploy various interpretive repertoires to construct the psychological, interactional, emotional, behavioural, imaginative and perceptual dimension of spirituality. The paper indicates that the Hararghe Oromo’s dhikr culture is a hermeneutic exercise that involves cognitive and analytical engagement with the exoteric meanings as well as the esoteric meanings of the world. One can thus take dhikr as a socio-cultural site for analysing the nature of hermeneutically conveyed social–psychological constructs of religion and spirituality. The paper offers also the epistemological and conceptual implications of the study.