Georgetown Student Mashael Al Hajri Wins Research Award

Mashael Al-Hajri from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFSQ) has won the ‘Best Student Research’ award at the recently-held Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum, signifying the university’s leading efforts in the realm of research.

Mashael Al-Hajri, SFSQ’14, focused her empirical study on the unique characteristics of the neighborhoods in the Gulf, known as Fireeqs, and the socio-cultural aspects of urbanism they lead to.

Entitled ‘The Concept of Fireeq: Is it a contemporary, culturally sustainable urban design paradigm”, Al-Hajri’s research was conducted as part of her summer internship at Msheireb Properties as a research assistant for the Gulf Encyclopedia for Sustainable Urbanism (GESU). Msheireb Properties sponsors Harvard University’s research on the Gulf’s sustainable urbanism. The focus is on ten coastal cities in eight countries. Harvard’s Professor Spiro Pollalis noted that “the ultimate objective is to provide guidelines for future sustainable urban settings, both environmental and socio-economic.” The first phase of the research is to study the past and decode how cities developed and how houses were designed. It will look at how neighborhoods were formed. The link between human life and buildings is a fundamental component of the research conducted by many young people under the supervision of faculty both in the United States and in Qatar.

The project was submitted under the student research in humanities and social sciences category under the patronage of Georgetown’s Professor Rogaia Abusharaf at the Annual Research Forum, which took place from November 20-22 at the Qatar National Convention Center.

“Although my research was done under the supervision of Msheireb Properties, Georgetown SFSQ never failed to provide me with the facilities and the support needed to not only conduct research, but to excel at it. Georgetown SFSQ has always been a strong supporter of student research, guiding students to their full potential,” said Al-Hajri.

Georgetown University is known to be at the forefront of a wide range of world-leading research in the social sciences and humanities: from economics to history, from anthropology to international relations, from women’s studies to aspects of Islam from a social science perspective, and to the best ways of teaching Arabic to students of Arab heritage.

In Al-Hajri’s research, the tribal migration patterns to and from Qatar and its effect on the concept of “fireeq” from a socio-cultural perspective were examined. “The traditional culture of Qatar was largely based on the concept or the system of the “fireeq”. It provided the social and physical fabric that bound the Qatari culture together. The research objective was to question and elucidate whether the concept of “fireeq” can be a culturally sustainable urban design model in contemporary times in Qatar,” explained Al-Hajri. “The research will become my part of the contribution to the GESU encyclopedia,” added Al-Hajri.

GESU is a holistic, multi-year, cross-disciplinary, cross-border study focusing on sustainable urbanism in the Gulf Region and is sponsored by Msheireb Properties, a subsidiary of Qatar Foundation. The research project is being led by Harvard University Graduate School of Design, who is basing the methodology on a rigorous understanding of the past, present and future development trajectories in the region as well as on the most current knowledge of sustainability.

“We are delighted that Mashael has received this important acknowledgement for an excellent project. Her work embodies values at the core of Georgetown’s mission in Qatar: to train students to use sound methods of inquiry so that they may produce reliable and useful knowledge for Qatar’s society,” said Dr. John T. Crist, Director of Research at SFSQ. 

“The training for research offered through SFSQ not only builds human capital in Qatar, but also promotes Qatar’s rapidly increasing profile within the international research community and fosters productive partnerships with Qatari industries and other top international corporations in Doha,” added Crist.