Cultural diversity and development at the “Authors’ Forum”

The Qatari Authors Forum, within the operational plan of Ministry of Culture and Sports and within the activities of Doha, the Capital of Culture in Islamic World and in cooperation with the Qatari Committee for Education, Culture and Science, organized a workshop entitled “Cultural Diversity, the path to dialogue and development” as a part of the celebration of the international day of cultural diversity.

The workshop presented by Dr. Khalid Al-Balushi over a period of two days sought to identify the essence of culture, its importance, elements and characteristics and to emphasize cultural diversity as a path to dialogue and development. In addition, the workshop sought to identify the international Fund for Cultural Diversity and conditions for financing projects to support culture in the developing countries.

Some employees from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Qatar Museums, the General Organization for the Cultural Village, Katara, and the cultural centers participated in the workshop.

Al- Balushi stressed the importance of cultural diversity and its effect on individual that is continuous increase of knowledge, creating various social relations, building confident and strong personality, increasing innovation and creativity and solving problems in a positive way. Also, he stressed importance of cultural diversity and its effect on society in general as it increases competencies, increases production, reinforces respect among members of the society.

The lecturer discussed the most important challenges facing promotion of cultural diversity including difficulties that face directors and officials when managing people from different cultural backgrounds and environments. These difficulties are represented in setting standards and principles suitable for all in addition to language barriers that prevent effective and proper communication between people (language difference). Also, the lecturer indicates that within these challenges are unfair interest that the majority group may have at the expense of the minority either within the same country or within the same institution and the disintegration and bias among members of various groups that causes lack of trust and respect among them in addition to disputes and conflicts that arise as a result of the different opinions and views towards certain problem.

He emphasized that cultural diversity is the path to dialogue and development within cultural diversity stressing that a person with good understanding of the nature of his culture, identity and beliefs can understand the idea of people’s differences in values and ideas and then respect and accept them calling for appreciation of this difference and getting rid of stereotype as the human will not be able to have any cultural response in case he sticks to stereotypes that have been built regarding different cultures.