LONDON — Nearly 3000 Diaspora Armenians in 17 cities in four countries took part in ADS 2019, which was launched in September 2019 in Argentina, Canada (Montreal), Lebanon and Romania.
“Over 100 people were involved with this project in one way or another,” explained ADS director Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian of University of Oxford. In addition to a core of academics and researchers who lead the research, “this year we set up local advisory and research teams in each place and engaged all community organizations in a given country in the process of organizing the fieldwork,” said Dr. Tchilingirian.
ADS aims to provide a snapshot of the contemporary Diaspora by studying opinions on identity, language and culture, community and political engagement, and relations with Armenia.
“The ADS results would provide useful data to institutional and community leaders in the Diaspora and policy-makers in Armenia,” said Dr. Tchilingirian, “it will give them an idea as to what the thinking is in each community and generally in the Diaspora on a host of subjects and issues.”
The data and the knowledge gained from this year’s survey will be available to the general public, scholars and institutions during the first quarter of 2020, which will be published on the ADS website.
“We are pleased that the second year of this multi-country systematic survey of the Diaspora has been concluded with extensive fieldwork and large participation,” said Dr. Razmik Panossian, Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Armenian Communities Department. “A crucial part of our mandate is to support Armenian Studies globally, a vital element of which is understanding the Diaspora. I thank all the people who were involved with and supported the ADS this year,” he added.
The full results of last year’s Pilot Survey, conducted in May and June 2018 in Boston, Cairo, Marseille and Pasadena, was published earlier this year in a 150-page report and could be downloaded for free from this website.