Workshop on countering violent extremism held

KARACHI: The third regional training workshop on Countering Violent Extremism Media Product Development for selected students of media studies from 10 universities of Sindh and Balochistan provinces was held here on Thursday.

The workshop has been organised by the Paigham-e-Pakistan and Pakistan Peace Collective (PPC), a research and communication project of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which aims at equipping students with professional media product development skills with a deeper understanding of the role of media in countering violent extremism.

Syed Akber Mehmood Shirazi formally inaugurated the training workshop and welcomed the participants. In his opening remarks, he said the training module focuses on developing professional skills of the upcoming journalists in Pakistan on how to address the issues around extremist behaviour and how the media students can perform their role in peace building through developing creative media content.

Day one of the training started with a session by Qatrina Hossain, a senior journalist, on the impact of violent extremism in Pakistan (social and media narrative). Whereas, researcher and social sector consultant Nazish Brohi, religious scholar Rehan Ahmed Yousufi and Faizan Gul from the PPC delivered lectures regarding narrative analysis of religiously motivated extremism and use of smart phones in producing media content. They also apprised the participants on means to help develop their skills for critical thinking and analysis.

The participants attended the training workshop from various universities from Sindh and Balochistan provinces, including Jamshoro, Quetta and Karachi. This is the third consecutive regional training whereas two such trainings were held earlier this month. The one in Lahore trained media students from universities of Punjab province and the second held in Islamabad catered to media students of universities from federal capital, Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.