Forghani Proposes the Establishment of Centre for Teaching Peace Journalism

Directorate for International Academic Cooperation —

The Third Academic Forum of Iran and the Arab World was convened with the participation of 20 Arab and Iranian members in the capital of Tunisia. During this Forum, Professor Mohammad Mehdi Forghani, Dean of the Faculty of Communication Sciences, presented a paper on "Media and Intercultural Communications between Iranian and Arab Worlds".

In this paper, Prof. Forghani insisted on the cultural commonalities between Iranian and Arab Worlds and appealed for more attention to be paid to "minimising the existing intercultural tensions". He introduced the Peace Journalism model as a good path towards strengthening the understandings and sympathies among different cultures and as the main tool for achieving this aim. While acknowledging ATU's willingness to establish the first "Centre for Teaching Peace Journalism" in the world, Forghani proposed a day in the global calendar to be marked as the World Peace Journalism Day.

This forum was convened thanks to the collaborations among the Permanent Secretariat of the International Cultural Dialogues at Culture and Islamic Communications Organization; Islamic Republic of Iran's Cultural Attaché Office in Tunisia; and University of Manouba (Tunisia) on 12 November 2017. The Forum is established with the aim of facilitating the connections between Iranian and Arab cultural and academic scholars. The first and second rounds of the Forum were convened in 2015 and 2016.