BUILDING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTAL PARTNERSHIPS IN TIMES OF CRISIS


When confronted with protracted conflicts and systemic crises, the educational, communications and policy planning sectors can either be part of the problem or contribute to their resolution. In 2019, professors, students and community activists joined forces to set up the Gender, Communications and Global Mobility (GCGM) studies unit in order to respond to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Lebanon.

As a research unit, we have focused on those topics we know best because of our going research, training and volunteer work in the fields gender mainstreaming and diversity management, media and communications, migration and refugee issues, as well as sustainability in environmentally sensitive areas of the West Asia North Africa (WANA) region.


The GCGM has followed a regional approach by focusing on our community base, we were able to deal with issues as diverse as workplace health and safety, diversity and inclusivity in the education, housing, and social services, or sustainable agriculture and tourism, using a grassroots approach. We combined this bottom-up perspective with work in the fields of Creative Commons (CC), Open Educational Resources (OER) and service learning, both in the university and the larger community. With the beginning of the social upheavals in Lebanon (2019), the COVID-19 related lockdown, and collapse of the economy as of 2020, the GCGM team was able to combined its over 15 years of experience in digital and open-source research, education, and community service with the new challenges of an online economy.


Since our founding in 2019, we have carried out projects, done training sessions, & provided consultancy in the fields of:

  • Cyber-safety and security for women and girls;
  • The impact of state failure and economic collapse on marginalized groups in society;
  • Gender-based violence (GBV);
  • The resource curse and resource blessing in the extractive industries sector;
  • The impact of the global COVID-19 lockdown on communication and education;
  • Diversity management and intersectionality in the workplace;
  • Feminism and the digital economy;
  • Media self-regulation and just governance;
  • Mobility, migration, and refugee issues, using a comparative approach;
  • The human rights crisis in the WANA region.






Projects & Activities

Intersectionality & Diversity Management
Gendered Organizational Research