^{Photocredit: Hoda El Mahgoub}

Over the course of three days on the 13th, 14th and 21st of April 2020 the Cairo Liaison Office organized and successfully concluded its first webinar on Academic Writing aimed at Social Scientists from the MENA region. With over 150 applications from the region, the webinar proved to be an attractive tool to gather scholars from the region that are specialized on humanities and social sciences. To maintain the interactive nature of this webinar, around 30 applicants were selected in a very competitive and rigorous selection process. With participants from 8 different countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Iraq, Palestine and Tunisia) as well as a broad variety of social scientists of different disciplines, the webinar served as a melting pot and networking platform for scholars of the whole region.

We all write occasionally, if not on a daily basis. Especially students, in the course of their studies, and afterwards, have to carry out so many writing assignments. However, writing an article or an academic research paper can be challenging and for some, it can be stressful. Good writing, especially for academic purposes, requires not only research and analytical skills, but also careful management of time and paying close attention to small details.

In this sense and in response to the current Covid-19 pandemic and the status of extended home-stay around the world the Cairo Liaison Office of Freie Universität Berlin organized this “Academic Writing Webinar” in solidarity with the community of scholars of the region, especially in these difficult times.

This webinar was co-instructed by Dr. Riham Bahi, Associate Prof. of Political Sciences at the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences, Cairo University and Dr. Mustafa Abdalla, Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, who was joining the webinar from Berlin. The webinar aimed at introducing the participants to the different steps of writing an academic piece and the issues that need to be taken into consideration in order to produce publishable work.

This said, the workshop has shed light on the structure and language needed to compose an academically sound piece of writing. It also exposed the participants to strategies to make writing enjoyable as they learned about how to organize their ideas and how to write about them clearly in an academic manner. The webinar was designed to help the participants to develop a well-structured article, to learn how to use academic vocabulary and to link devices needed for connecting ideas both at the sentence and paragraph levels.

Stay tuned to our Website and Facebook page to find out when the next digital activity will take place!

Check out the photo album of the webinar here