Registration Opens for Community Classes

Building on the success of its popular series of community classes, Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) has now opened registration for the autumn session of its Community Education Program. Beginning October 28, members of the public in Qatar will have the opportunity to learn a new skill or explore personal interests through a diverse range of courses.

The University’s Community Education Program is open to all nationals and residents of Qatar, with weekly classes designed for the evenings especially to suit the needs of working professionals. There are 14 courses on offer this fall, which will be taught over six weeks at GU-Q’s Education City campus. A number of these classes are taught exclusively in Arabic, including a new introductory course in Emergency and Disaster Management, Arabic Formal Writing, and Arabic Public Speaking.

The line-up for the fall session includes six new courses, which cover topics ranging from Public Diplomacy in Global World to understanding International relations in the Gulf, Women in Arab Fiction, and Turkish Literature. Classes are taught by a range of GU-Q faculty and staff, as well as leading academics and private sector experts in Qatar.

One of the courses offered for the first time is Public Diplomacy in a Global World, in which students will learn the difference between “hard” and “soft” power, understanding the tools of soft power through public diplomacy and how effective it is to utilize the media, strategic communications, and advocacy campaigns. This course is designed to equip participants with an ability to learn, analyze and assess the tools of public diplomacy. 

Turkish literature is another new course. It tackles the history of Turkish literature starting from the first novelist in the second half of the nineteenth century and ending with the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. This course aims to offer some perspectives on central debates and their socio-political ramifications in Turkey in the last hundred years through leading literary figures and key texts.

Another interesting new course is “Women in Arab Fiction” which deals with gender issues in Arab Popular literature by expatriate and Arab authors. The course attempts to compare the ways in which authors conceptualize life in the Middle East in fiction. It is designed as an introduction to the historical, cultural, and scholarly contexts for exploring popular Arab literature and culture.

Taking the current fluid situation of the Gulf region into account, “Understanding International Relations in the Gulf Region” is another important course offered for the first time. It aims to explain and analyze the dynamics of inter-state relations and the issues that affect all of them starting from the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war (1979-88); the Kuwait crisis (1990-91); 9-11 and the Iraq war (2001-2005); the Arab spring (2011-13) and the GCC crisis (2014-present).

While the community classes are non-credit, participants who attend at least five out of the six classes receive a certificate of participation. To date, more than 500 students have taken part in the program, which GU-Q has offered twice a year since March 2015.

While registration is open until the end of the first week of classes (October 28), GU-Q is offering a discount on fees for students who register before October 7, 2018. The classes are open to students over the age of 18, and no previous qualification or degree is required in order to enroll. More information about the courses is available on the Community Education Program website: https://qatar.sfs.georgetown.edu/cc