Press release
UNESCO Concludes First Online Workshop to Strengthen Qatari Capacities for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage
In her opening speech, Dr Paolini expressed “UNESCO’s extreme pleasure to respond to the request by the Qatari National Commission and Ministry of Culture and Sports and organise this training to further build national capacities and update its inventories of intangible cultural heritage,” expressed Dr Paolini on behalf of UNESCO.
During the workshops, participants, including civil servants from the Ministry of Culture, researchers and practitioners in the field of culture had the opportunity to have a first-hand experience on inventory making and to put what they have learned into practice during field visits to a variety of communities.
The emphasis in the workshop was on interactivity and active learning. It included lectures on various topics, group discussions, and hands-on exercises, designed to help acquire the participatory research techniques required for community-based inventorying of intangible cultural heritage and to reinforce capacity to obtain free, prior and informed consent from the communities concerned by an inventory. A fruitful fieldwork practicum was proposed for the same reason, where participants worked on intangible cultural heritage elements they had identified in the workshop.
Participants should now be able to perform some or all of the following tasks: choose a community-based inventorying approach in the context of implementing the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage (2003); know how free, prior and informed community consent can be obtained; demonstrate a capacity to apply one or more of the acquired participatory research techniques/skills, namely: interviewing, audio recording, photography, participatory video and participatory mapping; demonstrate an understanding of how to operate documentation equipment provided for the workshop; and organize research findings in permanent form for access by others.
Participants should now be able to perform some or all of the following tasks: choose a community-based inventorying approach in the context of implementing the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage (2003); know how free, prior and informed community consent can be obtained; demonstrate a capacity to apply one or more of the acquired participatory research techniques/skills, namely: interviewing, audio recording, photography, participatory video and participatory mapping; demonstrate an understanding of how to operate documentation equipment provided for the workshop; and organize research findings in permanent form for access by others.
For more information about the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, please visit:
For more information on this activity, please contact: Junaid Sorosh-Wali, Culture Programme Specialist at UNESCO Office for GCC and Yemen, at j.sorosh@unesco.org(link sends e-mail) and/or Georges Khawam, Culture Programme Assistant, at g.khawam@unesco.org
