The Arab Families Working Group (AFWG), in collaboration with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), organized an intensive training workshop on proposal writing and research design in social sciences on January 19-21, 2018 in Amman, Jordan.
Led by Dr. Suad Joseph, Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis, and Dr. Barbara Ibrahim, Advisor to the President of the American University in Cairo (AUC), the workshop gathered 21 participants from 7 Arab countries (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, and Tunisia).
Organizers and participants marked the beginning of the workshop with a moment of silence in remembrance of Dr. Mona Khalaf, a founding member of the Arab Families Working Group, and a prominent scholar and activist in the field of women's rights, who passed away on January 6, 2018, while visiting her family in New York. Dr. Khalaf was a regular AFWG trainer, who was expected to take part in the workshop in Amman.
Over the three-day training, participants were engaged in the meticulous process of designing a quality research proposal - from the initial stage of identifying the research problem and developing a hypothesis to the final stages of thinking about theoretical frameworks, methodology, budgeting for the study, and writing for targeted publications such as reports, a dissertation, or a journal article.
Participants were required to prepare a proposal prior to the workshop, and spent the three days developing and refining their proposals for submission.
The group came from a number of academic disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, linguistics, media studies, and the health sciences.
Founded in 2001, AFWG is a collaborative project of 16 scholars from universities, NGOs, and research foundations, who carry out research on Arab families and youth in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and their diasporas. AFWG is committed to training a new generation of scholars to carry out engaged transformative social science research. AFWG is co-hosted at the University of California, Davis (USA) and The American University in Cairo (Egypt).