Annual Meetings of the Scholarship Initiative

Annual Conference 2023

From May 9 to 11, 2023, the second annual meeting of the German-Ethiopian Fellowship Initiative took place at the Centre for Trancultural Studies in Gotha. The Centre invited fellows studying and researching at European universities and research institutions to a networking meeting in Gotha as part of the Gerda Henkel Foundation's scholarship initiative. The programme included intensive discussions on a wide range of topics, such as cartography in Ethiopia, communal meat consumption, ethnographic fieldwork during the pandemic, freedom of expression in Ethiopia and many more. The participants also visited the collection of oriental manuscripts in the Gotha Research Library.

A public evening event entitled "Frieden schaffen – How to Build Peace" was also held on May 9, 2023. All interested parties were invited to a panel discussion in the castle church of Gotha's Friedenstein Castle. The background was the Ethiopian civil war and the recently initiated peace process. Ethiopian artist Michael Hailu, former German ambassador to Ethiopia Brita Wagener, Dr Alula Tesfay and Erfurt-based international law expert Michael Riegner discussed the question "How to build peace?" on the podium. The event was part of the "Building Peace" lecture series organised by the University of Erfurt's Department of History. It was sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Freundeskreis GothAdua e.V.

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Annual Conference 2022

On October 20 and 21, 2022, the first annual conference of the German-Ethiopian Fellowship Initiative funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation took place at the Centre for Transcultural Studies in Gotha, to which we invited the other fellows already studying and researching in Europe, who work in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Mainz, Munich, Paris and Würzburg, among others, to Gotha for a networking meeting.

Prepared by the scholarship holders present in Gotha, there was a dense programme in which all participating scholars gave an insight into their ongoing historical, anthropological, geographical or media studies research and artistic work. Sven Ballenthin, Iris Schröder and Wolbert Smidt gave an insight into the rich holdings on Ethiopia in the Gotha Perthes Collection, which belongs to the University of Erfurt. Claudia Berger also presented the BMBF-funded research and digitisation project "Cartographies of Africa and Asia (KarAfAs)" - an impulse that prompted some of the scholarship holders present to explore their own possible research with the Gotha map materials. The contributions of future scholarship holders, who are currently still in Tigray or waiting for their visa in Addis Ababa, left a deep impression on all participants and presented their short reports partly as text and partly as video. As an artistic commentary on the ongoing war, the short film "Silence the Guns" was one of the contributions that all those present are likely to remember in particular.

A public evening event also made it possible to step out of the immediate university environment and into contact with the city of Gotha. This was organised in cooperation with Gotha's Ernestinum grammar school and the GothAdua e.V. friends' association and met with a remarkable response. With lively participation from the scholarship holders present, the participants discussed with the large Gotha audience the question of how the scholarship holders could make a new start in Europe and the prospects and opportunities for further scientific cooperation despite the ongoing difficult situation in Tigray.

_{Pictures: Group picture of the annual conference of the German-Ethiopian Scholarship Initiative & visit to the Gotha Perthes Collection © Dr Alula Tesfay}