KARAHI: The Alliance Francaise Karachi and the Embassy of France have put together a social sciences open doors programme, which will begin at the alliance on Friday. This was announced by Martine Herlem-Hamidi, an official of the French embassy, at the Karachi Press Club on Thursday evening.

Ms Hamidi said the aim of the programme was to give more visibility and importance to exchanges between French and Pakistani scholars working in the field of social sciences. It would include a monthly gathering of scholars, writers and journalists discussing social issues. The embassy would bring a French scholar to Pakistan every month and seminars, conferences and workshops would be held at which luminaries from both countries would be able to investigate matters falling under the purview of social sciences. The arrival of anthropologist Franck Mermier and historian of Islamic art Noha Sadek in Pakistan had given them the opportunity to begin the event on Oct 10 with Ms Sadek’s talk on mediaeval Islamic art and textiles at the alliance, she said.

Mr Mermier said social sciences led us to understand what’s happening in the world. The subject was not just about academic sessions held by certain academic circles. It enabled us to know about the phenomenon of globalisation which concerned everybody in the world. Social sciences did not belong to national domain but to a global one. Concepts were travelling everywhere, and the tools to understand those concepts were the same.

Mr Mermier said his talk on Saturday would be on the identity issue in our world. In that regard he touched upon the Arab Spring and argued that it had entered another phase of a historic period.

Ms Sadek said as a historian of Islamic art her area of interest was cultural heritage. She would speak on two topics — signs of power and faith in mediaeval Islamic textiles, and the role of women in Islamic art — at T2F on Saturday. With regard to the former, she said it was generally about the use of inscriptions on textiles as form and content, and the latter would focus on the women that had strong roles in the political, economic and cultural growth of society.

Alliance Francaise director Jean Francois Chenin told journalists about the dates of the three lectures, two of which would take place at the alliance (Oct 10 and 11) and one at T2F (Oct 11).

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2014