Launch of 11th Round of Mada al-Carmel’s Seminar to Support Academic Research Skills among Palestinian Graduate Students (December 2025)

On Saturday, 6 December 2025, Mada al-Carmel held the opening session of the 11^th round of its Seminar to Support Academic Research Skills among Palestinian Graduate Students. The event took place at Mada’s offices in Haifa, attended by 16 graduate students from different universities pursuing a broad range of social, political, cultural and humanistic studies.

The session commenced with an introduction to the seminar by Dr. Areen Hawari, General Director of Mada al-Carmel, and Dr. Khaled Anabtawi, the Seminar’s Academic Director and a researcher at Mada al-Carmel. They each stressed the importance of creating a supportive space that allows the participants to engage in collective thinking and share their research experiences.

During an initial round of introductions, the participants gave overviews of their academic tracks, research projects, and areas of interest. Next came a presentation by Dr. Raifa Jabareen – an alumna of the seminar, researcher in health education, and lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing at Haifa University – who shared her own experiences of conducting research and developing her thesis. The participants then presented their own research questions and initial abstracts of their theses, followed by comments from the group and preliminary feedback from Dr. Anabtawi, Dr. Hawari, and fellow seminar members.               

It was the first in a series of the seminar’s eight sessions, which aim to refine the participants’ research skills, help them to advance their research projects, foster academic and critical dialogue on a range of intellectual, social and political issues, and cultivate new analytical tools capable of challenging the traditional epistemic hegemony, by providing an interactive academic space that encourages critical and creative thinking.

The seminar participants are: Lareen Khshiboun, Rabab Hijazi, Adan Hijazi, Maria Makhoul, Lana Khaskieh, Nisreen Nashef, Kamal Ali Hassan, Mustafa Rinawi, Jule Farraj, Ruba Far-Wajih, Fatina Al-Husseini, Janan Abdu, Samara Shbat, Sanaa Hamoud, Hanadi Saleh, and Yasser Manna’.

The seminar is part of Mada al-Carmel’s Graduate Student Support Program. It is supervised by Dr. Mohanad Mustafa, the Academic Director of the program and academic advisor to the seminar.