Teaching is a complex and challenging profession. This profession involves endless efforts to learn, analyze, and teach others the acquired and accumulated knowledge in systematic and organized ways. Professor Jalata uses historical facts, logical reasoning, concepts, and critical theories in teaching the issues of social inequality, conflict, and social change on local, regional, and global levels. The modern world has been changing very fast for the last five centuries. On one level, the evolution of the global economy is evident in dramatic ways. On another level, the global economic transformation has serious consequences on different cultures, states, and various indigenous peoples.
To help his students comprehend long-term and large-scale social changes, Professor Jalata’s teaching philosophy emphasizes the development of professional skills that assist them to understand the interplay between the historical and cultural forces producing social inequality and conflict, change, and continuity across several centuries. Acquiring such skills equips students to challenge the approaches that are universalizing and naturalizing the issues of social inequality and conflict in order to reify them.
The critical integration of historical facts and rigorous theoretical analysis helps expose the dogma of institutions, such as education, religion, the economy, the state, on the issues of social inequality and change. His main objective is to engage students in the processes of active learning, thinking, and questioning. By linking his research insights with his teaching, Professor Jalata demonstrates the difference between the knowledge of domination and the knowledge of liberation or emancipation.
Professor Jalata teaches diverse courses, such as Global Studies/the Modern World
System; Race and Ethnicity; African American Studies; African
Studies; Comparative Studies in African and African American
Societies; Comparative Poverty and Development; Black Communities
in Urban America; Sociology of Development; Advanced Studies in the
Political Economy of Race and Ethnicity, and the Modern World System.
Contact Information
Department of Sociology
901 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996
Phone: (865) 974-7027
Fax: (865) 974-7013
Email: ajalata@utk.edu
Books

Oromummaa: Oromo Culture, Identity and Nationalism

Oromia & Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868-2004,

State Crises, Globalization, and National Movements in the Northeast Africa

Oromo Nationalism and the Ethiopian Discourse: The Search for Freedom and Democracy


