Mosaic in Doha

I hate backdating my blogs, but I really felt the need to post on this one just to keep track of what's happening over here...

Two Sundays ago, Feb 24th, was the beginning of several hectic weeks/weekends in a row for me. The kickoff to this flurry of activity was the Mosaic conference on gender issues annually held in Pittsburgh in February. In years past people have tried to bring it to Doha but budgeting and logistics have always come in the way. This year I've been planning it as an initiative to test gender-specific programming for leadership development. The idea came over the winter break when I was in Pittsburgh with a group of students and met up with Helen Wang, one of the student affairs peeps on the PGH campus. The theme this year was "Gender-Fender-Benders" and I soon realized that students in Doha have no clue what a fender bender is, regardless of the fact that they are likely to have been in several already, and so the meaning was lost. Still, we planned, implemented, and I think came out with some great results.

The conference is usually a Sunday morning conference in PGH, so inevitably it was a Sunday evening conference for us. We started off at 6pm with dinner and the keynote speaker, Dr. Michael Kimmel, spokesperson for the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, pro-feminist educator and activist on issues of masculinity and gender. His address was one of the best I've heard of the Mosaic speakers, even comparing with past speakers such as Dr. Ruth and Gloria Steinem. You can click here to watch his speech. The first timeslot of sessions was from 7:30-8:30 with “What you Will or Goethe’s Curse” and "Fill in the Blank Feminist" (although that didn't work out in the end b/c of technical issues). The second timeslot from 8:30-9:30pm offered "Superwomen: Can They Really Do it All?" and "Beyond the veil: Arab Women and our roles in the workplace and beyond" as sessions. All of these used videoconferencing technology, meaning that the people presenting in Pittsburgh could see and interact with the participants in Doha, and vice versa. This proved crucial to keeping students engaged and interested in the topics and speakers. The coolest part of all of this was the fact that we actually offered a session from Qatar, the "beyond the veil" session in the 2nd timeslot, where our student actually had a chance to share their experiences and perspective with students in Pittsburgh on what it means to be a woman in an Arab or Muslim culture. Not only was it a great way to foster interaction between the two campuses, it helped dispel stereotypes for our US students as much as it helped our Qatar students to understand the perspective of US students and for them to verbalize the differences, and similarities, between the two cultures. It was an incredible learning experience for everybody.

One of the most important pieces of feedback for me was the amount of interest students had in doing gender-specific programming. In the past Student Affairs/Activities has tried to stay away from specifically targeting demographic groups partially because the community is too small to do that but also partially because we've tried to instill a sense of shared experience as much as possible since our population is so diverse. However, it became at least somewhat evident that women-specific initiatives would be quite well received. Hopefully we'll have a chance to pursue that more. The other big take-away from this whole experience was the extent to which a gender-issues conference in a US context is even remotely applicable to a non-US context. The answer, I think, is closer to not really. Students were exposed to new ideas, but I think a lot of those ideas are so far outside of their worldview that students don't really process through or chew on those ideas. They're so removed from students' experiences that it's hard for them to relate to them and discuss them. Although learning about others' perspectives is educational, I just don't know if the overall gain from offering a wester-centric program is worth trying to transplant it here. We're really going to have to work on thinking about context on this one.