12 fellows to lead unique and promising research projects.

Doha – QatarDebate Center

QatarDebate, a member of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, announced the candidates selected to join the first batch of the QatarDebate Fellowship Program, with the aim of sponsoring and supporting 12 research projects to contribute to the development of knowledge and impact in the field of debates and related fields.

The selected candidates for this batch of the fellowship program were selected to include a group of distinguished researchers in academia. The category of “Senior Fellow” included Dr. Jonas ElBousty, Professor of Language Studies at Yale University, and Dr. Pierre Boulos, Associate Professor of Critical Thinking in The Canadian University of Windsor, Dr. Abdul Gabbar Al-Sharafi – Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Sultan Qaboos University, and Dr. Fadoua El-Heziti – Professor of Higher Education for Andalusian Studies at Hassan II University of Morocco. This category included both engineer Ali Al-Zawqari, a candidate for a doctorate in artificial intelligence, and engineer Muhammad Hassan Baaoum is a faculty member at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, and a researcher in Islamic heritage, Professor Abdussamet Kocak from Fatih Sultan Mehmet University in Istanbul.

Five additional fellows were accepted into the program with distinguished competencies in order to enable them and encourage them to submit solid research work in the field of debates. This category included the specialist in international relations, Mr. Moez Dhahri from Tunisia, a lecturer in logic Mr. Muhammad Komath from India, and a graduate of Georgetown University Mr. Mohammed El-Okda from the United States, in addition to Mr. Rashid Al-Rumaihi, a former debate member and anthropology student at the University of Sussex from Qatar, and Ms. Delaney Hurley, a student at the prestigious Harvard University.

The Fellowship Program Committee at QatarDebate announced that the selection of the candidates for the first batch of this program came after a fierce competition among 177 applicants for the program. The Admission Committee also reported that the proposed research projects cover a number of knowledge areas of importance, some of which focus on conducting computer studies on debate discourse from the linguistic point of view and in terms of argumentative structure and the development of artificial intelligence tools in the field of argumentation in Arabic, and others are based around debate in the Islamic heritage, such as indexing and investigating some of the most important ancient Arabic manuscripts in this field, conducting comparative studies between contemporary argumentation theory and argumentation in the Islamic heritage, and studying intercultural dialogue in the Andalusian Islamic heritage, while other research of an educational nature is concerned with studying the impact of debate as a superior tool for learning and measuring the impact of its practice, for non-Arabic speakers and design mechanisms for employing the debate model in engineering and applied science education, and finally, some research focuses on conducting social studies on Arabic-speaking debating societies and comparing them with other English-speaking societies.

The launch of the first batch of the QatarDebate Fellowship is a pioneering step towards expanding the activities of QatarDebate in the academic and research field, after the success and excellence in reaching the world in the field of educational activities and organizing competitive debate tournaments.