PhD research: Indigenous ecological knowledge in Arsi Oromo oral narratives

Date
October 2022 to September 2026
Countries
Category
Keywords
Oromo
oral narratives
crisis management
Institutions
Jimma University (Ethiopia)
Research fields
Cultural Sciences
Languages and Literatures

This research project aims at analysing Oromo oral narratives from econarratological perspectives. Econarratlogy is often viewed as a new approach in literary and cultural studies in relation to the other literary theories such as Anthropocene and global ecological crisis, used to analyse literary texts for their ecological aspects. This project will study how ecological concerns in Oromo oral genres are at once a theme in the narratives and form an epistemological philosophical tradition, in this sense also being analytical. Combining the referential and the analytical, we aim at studying the interactions between humans and non-humans in Oromo oral narratives, a subject that has hitherto received little attention. This study will hence fill important gaps in mapping ecological discourses in Oromo oral narratives as well as the narratives’ potential to contribute to econarratological analysis.