Feven Cofré Eyob

Feven is researching virtual classrooms for Tigrinya philology and linguistics, in order to understand how students and teachers affirm their Tegaru identity through language reclamation efforts. Her research interest lies in the intersection of African diasporic identities, language and the pathways forged by digital communities who cultivate and engage with ancestral knowledge that is rooted in empowering Blackness. 

Memory Studies and Black Feminist thought are formative in Feven’s understanding of this nexus, as this work traces how exiled Eritreans in the diaspora and people in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia form solidarities in online spaces dedicated to Tigrinya language, culture and history. Her research seeks to investigate the ways that participants frame their gatherings and education in their mother tongue, Tigrinya, as reparative and healing even; believing this rigorous pedagogy in their mother tongue as a remedy to the enduring generational ruptures caused by conflict and forced displacement concentrated across the Ethiopia- Eritrea borderlands. 

These generational ruptures are located as having been deepened by and perpetuated since the Ethiopia–Eritrea partition at the end of the 19th century and having impacted every generation with resulting conflict since. Most recently, being the horrifying and extreme violence committed in Tigray. In light of this, broadly, Feven’s doctoral research shall address the ways that participants frame their gatherings and education in their mother tongue as forms of direct action to what they perceive as both a problem of language and (mis)education. In this vein, preliminary research questions aim to unpack: how language education at in the virtual classrooms strive to remedy the enduring generational distress caused by conflict since the partition; the impact of forced displacement concentrated across the Eritrea-Ethiopia borderlands; as well as the cultural identity and collective memory perceived to be getting “lost with the mother tongue” and “washed away”.  

By combining participant observation, digital ethnography, and ethnographic poetry, Feven works collaboratively with fellow students and elders in her fieldsite, to produce research that responds to furthering the aims of the community she is learning with. The next four years will be geared towards collectively coalescing a nuanced account of counter-memory practices in these digital worlds and to consider how virtual classrooms for learning Tigrinya linguistics function simultaneously as pedagogy, archive, and a medium for repair. 

• Language Reclamation
• Memory Studies
• Black Feminist Thought
• Tigrinya linguistics