This language is currently in review and will be available soon!
On 11-12 November 2022, the Project dldl/ድልድል Annual Conference was held in Addis Ababa in partnership with EMIRTA Research, Training and Development Centre (እምርታ). The conference focused on the nexus ‘Domestic Violence – Gender – Faith: Promoting Integrated and Decolonial Approaches to Domestic Violence Cross-culturally’ and sought to promote a better integration of theological and religious perspectives in gender-sensitive work on domestic violence and abuse, facilitate a bridging of different theoretical frameworks and approaches to achieve a more integrated lens through which to appraise the issue of domestic violence and abuse and to identify appropriate responses by means of working collaboratively, and contribute to a diversification of knowledge production in the area of domestic violence and abuse to achieve genuine knowledge sharing from the so-called Global South to the so-called Global North.
Over 100 physical and online participants attended during the two days of the annual conference. Many online speakers joined from the UK, Egypt, Australia and other countries. Among the physical presentations and keynote speeches, 14 were by or included Ethiopian speakers and 13 presentations were given by international presenters from the UK and other countries who submitted pre-recorded presentations to be broadcast at the conference venue. Additionally, five workshops were delivered by international specialists from the UK, US, Kenya, Pakistan and Italy, four of whom attended physically. The conference programme also included a film screening that showcased effectively how spiritual, cultural and secular responses to mental health can come together to inform both attitudes and responses to mental health issues in a village community in Ghana.
In line with the decolonial aims of project dldl/ድልድል, the conference presentations and discussions were recorded to be made available permanently and for free to a wider Ethiopian and international audience. The recordings of the conference are included in the report and are available directly through the project’s Vimeo account.
A post-conference report was produced by the organisers to summarise the key take-away messages of the conference and to share the major insights of the discussions and presentations with a wider audience. The report has also been envisioned to inform policy directions in Ethiopia to respond to domestic violence and abuse in integrated, faith-sensitive ways. The report includes also participants’ feedback on the conference, which was collected through a post-conference survey.
Readers can now delve deeper into some of the rich presentations made on the day by accessing the newly published open access Conference Proceedings, which features nine full papers.