IRCI held the Second Online Workshop of the ‘Publication Programme for Early Career Researchers’ on 29 October 2024, as part of the project of Asia-Pacific ICH Safeguarding Research Forum. The Programme, which started on 1 October 2024 with the Kick-off Workshop, aims to encourage early career researchers to become more interested and engaged in research for safeguarding ICH at the international level and to support them in publishing their research work in English.

The Second Online Workshop, attended by seven early career researchers participating in the programme, their designated mentors and the members of the Forum Planning Committee, consisted of three sessions. The first two sessions featured lectures by guest lecturers, while the last session was dedicated to a discussion based on the paper outlines submitted by the early career researchers.

In Session 1, Mr Rajesh Tandon (Founder-President, Participatory Research in Asia, India, and the co-chair of the UNESCO Chair on Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education) gave a talk entitled ‘Why Respectful Community Partnerships Matter?’ and emphasized the need for research that can appropriately return results/findings to the target community. Session 2 was a continuation of the Kick-off Workshop on academic writing in English, with Mr Paul Nerney and Ms Susan Lopez-Nerney (both Academic Writing Consultants for Research Publication) lecturing on ‘Later planning and drafting stages in the strategic process of developing a research paper’ and ‘Salient features of (publishable) academic English’ respectively.

Session 3, the main part of the workshop, was moderated by Mr Hanafi Hussin (Honorary Professor, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia). In this session, each participant gave a five-minute oral presentation on the outline of their research papers and received productive feedback and suggestions from their mentors, the Forum Planning Committee members, and the guest lecturers. Based on the comments and insights gained from the last two workshops, the Programme participants are now working on the draft of their research papers to be submitted by mid-December.