By MARY-JANE DEEB
For many years, the Library of Congress has collaborated with the Fulbright program (administered by the U.S. State Department under its Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs) by briefing Fulbright scholars traveling abroad about the countries they were to visit and describing the Library's holdings in their field.
A new collaborative project between the Library and the Fulbright program was initiated last spring, when the State Department asked the Library to videotape a September conference it was sponsoring on "Women in the Global Community" in Istanbul, Turkey.
The Fulbright office was eager to have the Library of Congress film the program for its Web site because of the high quality of the cybercast programs produced by the Library's Information Technology Services (ITS) team on the Library's Web site. The Fulbright office wanted to preserve and make accessible to a much wider audience this important program, which its staff had worked so hard to organize.
At the same time, the Library's African and Middle East Division and Office of Scholarly Programs were interested in including the conference on the Library's Web site to expand its outreach in international programs that enhance the understanding of other cultures. Additionally, the raw videotapes would become part of the Library's collections and complement existing materials.
The members of the Fulbright team included Renee Taft and Effie Wingate, senior program officer and program officer, respectively, from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the State Department. The Library's ITS team included Multimedia Coordinator Elizabeth Wulkan and multimedia specialists Dennis Armbruster, Patrick Raison, Kevin White and Amber York, who provided the engineering and technical expertise.
Participants interviewed at the Istanbul conference on "Women in the Global Community" included Abla Amawi, Akile Gursoy and Najat Khelil.
The conference took place from Sept. 18-21 at Bogazici University, formerly Roberts College, built of stone with red tiled roofs, which is located on hilly grounds covered with gardens and overlooks the Bosphorus. The conference opened with remarks by Sevket Pamuk, the vice rector of the university; Robert Pearson, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey; and Patricia S. Harrison, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs at the Department of State.
During the three-day conference, more than 80 participants took part in 11 panels and seven discussion groups. Panel presentations and discussion groups focused on topics such as women's roles in education, information and communication technologies, public health, economic policy, civil society, war and peace, and the political role of women. There were also four country-specific panels on Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey, which covered a variety of issues from reform of personal status laws and women in the media, to assistance to women refugees in countries that experienced prolonged periods of war. Most participants came from Muslim countries such as those represented on the country-specific panels, as well as from other nations such as Morocco, Algeria, Iran and Pakistan.
The Library's team filmed the introductory program and every panel discussion, as well as the banquet speakers on the last night of the conference at the Esma Sultan Yalisi Palace. With many of the presentations taking place at the same time, the production team used two cameras to ensure that they captured the full conference on videotape.
In addition to the formal program, the ITS team videotaped interviews by this writer with six exceptional Muslim women who were attending the conference for the Library's Web site on Muslim societies (www.loc.gov/locvideo/mslm/globalmuslim.html). Two each are from Afghanistan, Turkey and the Arab world.
Abla Amawi is a young, single mother of a 10-year-old girl, and an assistant resident representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) based in Amman, Jordan. Raised in a conservative family in Jordan, she received a doctorate in politics from Georgetown University. She turned down an academic career in the United States to work on problems of gender and poverty in the Middle East.
Akile Gursoy is the chair of the Department of Social Anthropology at Yeditepe University in Turkey. She is currently the head of the Turkish delegation to the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and the founder and president of the Association for Social Sciences and Health. The granddaughter of the first prime minister of Turkey under Attaturk, her research work has focused on poor working women in urban areas.
Gulsun Saglamer, Laila Enayat-Seraj and Sima Wali were interviewed by the Library's Mary-Jane Deeb.
Najat A. Khelil is the president of the Arab Women's Council Research and Education Fund and is a trained nuclear physicist who obtained her doctorate from the State University of North Texas. She has taught at the University of Algiers, George Washington University and Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., and she has lectured on women's issues around the world— from Jerusalem to Moscow, Toronto and Beijing. She is a former Fulbright grantee.
Gulsun Saglamer was elected by the faculty to the presidency of Istanbul Technical University in 1996. She is the first woman in Turkey to hold this position in the prestigious 225-year-old engineering and architecture institution and the only woman in Europe to have done so. Not only does she run the university, teach and write, but she has also designed many of the new buildings in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey.
Laila Enayat-Seraj is the daughter of a former Afghani ambassador to Egypt who studied at the American University in Cairo. She returned to Afghanistan and married, but when the Russian invasion took place, she fled to the United States where she continued her studies in international affairs. She joined the United Nations in Geneva and worked for various organizations, including UNDP. Her real love, though, is art and poetry, and she has recently translated from Persian the poems of an Afghani poetess who wrote 1,000 years ago.
Sima Wali is the president and chief operating officer of the Refugee Women in Development organization that focuses on re-integrating women living in conflict and post-conflict societies. An Afghani refugee to the United States herself, she is the recipient of Amnesty International's 1999 third annual Ginetta Sagan Fund Award, and served last year as one of only three women delegates to the U.N. peace talks on Afghanistan.
The conference and the interviews can be viewed on the Library's Web site at www.loc.gov/locvideo/fulbright.
Mary-Jane Deeb is an Arab World Area specialist in the African and Middle East Division and a recommending officer for Islamic materials.