Stable Jobs, Precarious Lives: Rural Public Servants in Ethiopia

我的论文通过阿姆哈拉地区边境地区农村公务员的生活和工作，探讨了埃塞俄比亚国家的日常运作。关于埃塞俄比亚发展中国家的强大、专制和天生的等级性质的观点，强调了政策和结构的强制性，这些政策和结构延伸到更小的人口单位。然而，对那些负责执行这项工作的人的审查却被忽视了。本文以长期在北示瓦进行的民族志田野调查为基础，通过密切关注日常社会世界和教师、推广工作者和管理人员的职业责任，提供了对国家最低水平的描述。在关注儿童营养、厕所推广和教育理念的章节中，通过个人生活史，我展示了国家工作对国家雇员自身的身体、情感和社会影响。我也关注物质的作用——包括母乳、粪便和咖啡——如何通过日常实践和表演不断构建状态，而不是作为一个抽象的巨石存在。我论文的发现挑战了非洲普遍需要国家就业的观念。尽管这些公务员在教育方面取得了成功，并在这种工作稀缺的情况下获得了稳定的正式工作，但他们感到自己被边缘化，在社会上被孤立，并依赖当地人民。政府工作人员在村庄之间来回奔波，寻求离城市更近的地方，或者离开国有就业岗位，从事小买卖的“奋斗经济”，或者受到非法移民的诱惑。他们不稳定的流动性与关于青年、不确定性和抱负的叙述形成鲜明对比，后者认为正式就业是社会和经济进步的一种手段。我在教育的背景下讨论了流动性的纠缠，这是一种普遍的公共利益，本应导致社会流动性，但相反，它把国家雇员从农村形式的团结（他们在那里长大）中抽离出来，只是为了把他们插入一种农村的异化和孤立（在他们不情愿地暂时被派驻的村庄）。他们渴望摆脱缓慢的农村未来，他们在政府工作内外的不稳定流动既是他们无法巩固社会联系的原因，也是他们无法巩固社会联系的后果。这项奖学金将使我能够发展和建立我的博士研究，使其成为专著，期刊文章和针对学术界内外不同受众的多次演讲。它还可以让我发展自己的职业生涯，作为一个研究人员，并通过合作开发一个未来的研究计划，并通过建立关系和网络建立专业技能。

My thesis explores the everyday workings of the Ethiopian state through the lives and work of rural public servants in a border area of Amhara Region. Ideas about the strong, authoritarian and innately hierarchical nature of Ethiopia's developmental state emphasise the coercive nature of policies and structures that reach down to ever smaller units of the population. However, scrutiny of those charged with carrying out this work has been neglected. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork in North Shewa, this thesis provides an account of the lowest level of the state through close attention to the everyday social worlds and professional responsibilities of teachers, extension workers and administrators. In chapters that concentrate on child nutrition, latrine promotion and the idea of education, and through an individual life history, I show the physical, emotional and social consequences of state work on state employees themselves. I also look at the role of substances - including breastmilk, excrement and coffee - in how the state is continually constructed through everyday practices and performances, rather than existing as an abstracted monolith.The findings of my thesis challenge the notion of the universal desirability of state employment in Africa. Despite their success in education and achievement of stable, formal work in a context where such jobs are scarce, these public servants feel themselves to be marginalised, socially isolated and dependent on local people. Government workers bounce between villages in a quest to get closer to the urban, or exit from state employment for the 'struggle economy' of petty trade or the siren lure of illegal migration. Their precarious mobility stands in contrast to narratives about youth, uncertainty and aspiration, which assume formal employment to be a means of social and economic progress. I discuss the entanglement of mobilities in the context of education, the universal public good that is supposed to lead to social mobility, but instead extracts state employees from rural forms of solidarity (where they grew up) only to insert them into a kind of rural alienation and isolation (in the villages where they are unwillingly and temporarily posted). In their desire to escape a slow rural future, their precarious mobility within and outside government employment is both cause and consequence of their inability to cement social ties.This fellowship would allow me to develop and build upon my PhD research into a monograph, a journal article and multiple presentations for different audiences, within and outside academia. It would also allow me to develop my career as a researcher and build professional skills by collaborating on the development of a future research proposal, and through building relationships and networks.