DOHA: The Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar will host the Education City Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Research Forum this year. The Forum, founded in 2007 was designed to bring faculty members from all of the Education City campuses together to discuss their teaching and research in various fields.

The forum consists of a group of about 25 scholars who meet 4 times during the semester to share their research and teaching concerns. It is designed to foster cross-campus and interdisciplinary research. Participants can discuss collaborative research projects which make the meetings an important venue for professional networking for researchers, building knowledge networks.

The differences between English and Persian in the area of speech acts and its link with different cultural values and norms will be discussed in the next session of the forum on February 18. Zohreh Eslami of Texas A & M University-Qatar will speak on Politeness across Culture and Communication Patterns which gives a detailed analysis of the use of the main and supportive linguistic strategies. The study reveals important differences in communicative styles of the two groups which can give insights into understanding different cultural values, norms, and assumptions concerning interpersonal use of language in a Western and a non-Western language.

In a related talk, Samia Touati Dietz of Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (VCUQatar) will present on Literacy, Access to Information and Development in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century Moroccan Society. The research aims to make a contribution to the debate on literacy issues in Morocco, particularly in terms of testing the purported benefits of literacy against its actual rewards in its context of use.

The study addresses the problematic of the shift of official attitudes towards literacy, trying to elucidate why there has been a shift at all. These are of course critical issues that also impact the entire Gulf region, including Qatar. The inaugural session of the forum this year was addressed by Dr Pablo Rodríguez del Pozo, MD, of WCMC-Q.