Academic Paper: Useful Education During Wasted Time: Thirty Years of the Life of the “Liberation Workshop” (Arabic)

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Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations has published an Arabic academic paper entitled “Useful Education During Wasted Time: Thirty Years of the Life of the ‘Liberation Workshop,’” by ‘Abdul Qadir Yasin.

The study presents a unique cultural experience, done by volunteers, without any external funding. It is the “Liberation Workshop” that provided education to about 500 trainees of both sexes, different ages and nationalities. Syrians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Sudanese and Libyans of various educational and intellectual levels and belonging to different political schools were trained. The workshop continued over a span of more than thirty years, and its location was alternating between Damascus and Cairo.

First, the author explains how the idea started, the preparations and how it was launched in the Yarmouk refugee camp, Damascus. Then the activity evolved from just being a journalism course to offering a workshop that teaches various materials and includes many activities, such as lectures, courses, seminars, research and research discussions. Then, the trainees agreed to establish a publishing cooperative that would publish and distribute individual and joint books. Afterwards, the workshop moved to Cairo, where trainees of all walks of life attended, and the workshop became the “Liberation Workshop.”

The paper concludes that more than a quarter of this workshop trainees were able to publish researches in peer-reviewed journals; 70 trainees co-authored books, 18 published their own books and four assumed the position of editor-in-chief in newspapers. The trainees have built strong relations between each other, which would not have been possible, especially between scholars of different intellectual and political schools, had it not been for the common space provided by the “Liberation Workshop.”