Saturday, November 2, 2024

VCUarts Qatar students receive grant to preserve traditional games

The grant is for a research proposal “Preserving Qatari Cultural Heritage, through the Preservation and Promotion of Traditional Games”. 

The Qatar National Research Fund, a member of Qatar Foundation, has awarded an Undergraduate Research Education Programme (UREP) grant to three faculty members and six students at VCUArts Qatar, a report in The Peninsula says

The grant is for a research proposal “Preserving Qatari Cultural Heritage, through the Preservation and Promotion of Traditional Games”. 

The project’s primary focus is to preserve intangible national culture for current and future generations by digitally archiving and promoting traditional Qatari games. 

VCUarts Qatar faculty members Patty Paine, Director, Liberal Arts & Sciences, Law Alsobrook, Associate Professor, Graphic Design, and Dr. Summer Bateiha, Associate Professor, Liberal Arts & Sciences, will mentor students Latifa Al Sulaiti, Maryam Al Muftah, Ghada Al Qashouti, Fatima Abbas, Naima Almajdobah, Amna Al Horr during the research process. 

The significance of the research lies in its capacity to preserve games that run the risk of being lost because of modernisation, urbanisation, and globalisation. When such games disappear, they take with them those values, narratives, histories, insights and identities linked to the culture of a population.

Patty Paine says “We discovered that there is scant information about Qatari traditional games and that there is a gap in the current knowledge about these games as important sources of intangible heritage,”. 

“The intangibility of traditional games and their reliance on collective memory makes them fragile and easily lost. We hope to preserve these games and the important cultural heritage they represent”, she adds. 

Besides their preservation the project also aims to publicise the narratives associated with them, among non-Qatari people, providing them with a deeper awareness and understanding of Qatari culture and traditions.    

The project is in consonance with Qatar’s National Vision 2030, partiularly Human Development and Social Development. It is consistent with UNESCO’s first Proclamation of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” first issued in 2001. 

UNESCO’s asserts “games reflect cultural diversity and foster mutual understanding and tolerance among communities and nations” and that preserving traditional games is “important for the generations to come. It is equally important that such knowledge remains in the public domain, and is accessible by everyone” 

The significance of the research lies in its capacity to preserve games that run the risk of being lost because of modernisation, urbanisation, and globalisation. When such games disappear, they take with them those values, narratives, histories, insights and identities linked to the culture of a population.

The researchers aim to create an accessible archive of traditional games to preserve and to study the games as cultural, historical, and narrative objects. 

Law Alsobrook says “We’re not just interested in the games but also in the stories of those who played the games. Through focus groups, surveys and individual interviews we hope to capture the recollections of those who played these games. In many ways, preserving these accounts is as important as preserving the games themselves.” 

A digital archive of these traditional games will also be developed and promoted through social media campaigns, and through the creation of materials that can be used in K-12 classrooms. 

The researchers hope that their investigations and findings would eventually lead to traditional gameplay gatherings and the creation of intergenerational traditional gaming clubs. 

The significance of the research lies in its capacity to preserve games that run the risk of being lost to the forces of modernisation, urbanisation, and globalisation. 

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David Solomon
David Solomon
(For over four decades, David Solomon’s insightful stories about people, places, animals –in fact almost anything and everything in India and abroad – as a journalist and traveler, continue to engross, thrill, and delight people like sparkling wine. Photography is his passion.)

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