Workshops

Workshops

Barcelona Research to Policy Workshop

In July, 2010, AFWG plans a workshop, co-organized by the International Development Research Center (Ottawa), and two external consultants to develop strategies for transforming research outcomes into policy messaging. Impacting policy related to families and youth in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon, has been a goal of AFWG since its inception. Many of AFWG’s Core Group members have played critical roles in working with NGO’s, United Nations, and their governments to shape policies toward families and youths in their countries. Towards that end, AFWG has organized and conducted a number of workshops with “stakeholders” — scholars, activists, and leaders in non-governmental organizations in Cairo, Ramallah, and Beirut. These workshops were co-funded by IRC and the Ford Foundation. The July 2010, workshop aims to train Core members of AFWG in transforming AFWG research outcomes into white papers, condensed reports, executive summaries, and policy messaging translatable to decision-makers and policy makers. Two consultants with considerable experience translating research to policy impacts will work with AFWG in this workshop: Simel Esim (International Labor Organization) and Lina Abou-Habib (Center for Research Training and Development, Beirut). In addition, AFWG will work with IDRC Program Officers, Rawwida Baksh and Emma Naughton to plan and carry out this workshop. The workshop will take place over a two-day period, July 16-17, 2010, in conjunction with the WOCMES conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Media Workshops:

The purpose of the Media Workshops is to engage media personnel and practitioners on the issues that AFWG researches. Through inviting key regional media outfits to a series of interviews and engagements around representations of Arab families in the media and AFWG research findings, AFWG can further disseminate its findings and help deconstruct the monolithic representation of families in the media.
Media Workshops held include:

Community Workshops:

The purpose of community workshops is to share research thoughts, topics, results, and methodologies with various sets of stakeholders who are involved with work on families in the countries where AFWG researches. They aim to bring together AFWG core group members and community activists, other colleagues and researchers of family studies, policy makers and governmental and non-governmental representatives involved in law and policy making around families, and professionals and practitioners engaged in transformative work on families. An engaged dialogue on the issues among these various constituencies is believed to develop further AFWG research and its responsiveness to community concerns and illuminate theoretical frameworks and methods to community practitioners. It will also allow for in-progress evaluation of AFWG research and on-going dissemination of research outcomes.
Community Workshops held include:

Proposal Writing Workshops:

Proposal writing workshops aim to provide training to graduate students, scholars, and NGO researchers on writing successful research proposals that help better articulate their research question and provide them with a greater probability of being funded. Workshops will be offered separately (or jointly where appropriate) to graduate students, scholars, and NGO researchers. Modeled after the proposal writing workshop that Suad Joseph offers, these workshops will utilize AFWG core members’ experience. Suad Joseph provides the basic guidelines and structure of the workshop to participants, while AFWG core group members will engage the participants in small group discussions on their individual projects. In each country, the local AFWG Core Group members will follow up with the trainees in either individual or group meetings to reinforce the training and address questions.
Proposal Writing Workshops held include:

  • Beirut, Lebanon: June 2008
  • Cairo, Egypt: March 2009
  • Ramallah, Palestine: December 2009
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