Global Heel: Gracie Young
October 14, 2024UNC Global Affairs
Carolina, Jordanian students amplify women’s stories through photography
Gracie Young ’26 was at a film studio in Amman, Jordan, listening to a local female producer when she began to understand the importance of women’s empowerment within the arts, a growing outlet for creative expression in the Middle East.
This year, Young participated in the “Raise Your Voice” program, a two-way exchange between UNC-Chapel Hill and American University of Madaba (AUM) in Jordan. The program was organized by UNC Global Affairs and funded by the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. The Morehead-Cain scholar, originally from Chapel Hill, traveled to Jordan in May, alongside other Carolina students, exploring what it means to be a woman in Jordan and the southeastern U.S. The Sijal Institute, a close partner of AUM, hosted the students and organized excursions, activities and lectures that enhanced their experience.
During the first half of the program, UNC-Chapel Hill students partnered with AUM students to experience aspects of women’s lives in Jordanian society, specifically through the research method known as photovoice. Photovoice is a way to describe what one sees or understands about a community through photography according to Alexandra Lightfoot, an associate professor with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Health Behavior in the Gillings School of Public Health, who traveled with the participants. Images are taken and selected to promote a narrative that often stimulates dialogue and interpretation.
“Women are going to find the way to do something they love and to display it, in any culture, in any society, in any place,” Young said, when asked what her biggest take away from the program was.
Young and her AUM partner created profiles of Jordanian women who established innovative spaces for other women to express themselves. She admired one interviewee in particular — a filmmaker — who runs her own studio, providing women in the local film industry with opportunities to produce their own work, which, the filmmaker said, is enormously difficult for women in the region because of the constraints on female expression.
“The best part of the exchange was connecting with the Jordanian students,” Young said. “It was really cool because my partner conducted the interviews in Arabic and translated for me.”
After interviewing three female business owners, Young and her partner took photographs and wrote profiles on each of them. From these experiences, Young said she discovered that art shows up in many ways: as acts of curiosity, love and, even sometimes, oppression. Young is interested in international humanitarian law, and through the “Raise Your Voice” project she explored the expression of Jordanian citizens affected by inequality.
The exchange influenced Young so much that, while there, she decided to stay in Jordan on a summer internship with a local nonprofit. The organization provides legal consulting and research for larger, global nonprofits.
This September, AUM students traveled to North Carolina to rejoin their Carolina partners and participate in the second part of the exchange, revisiting their photovoice projects in Jordan and expanding their scope to include aspects of women’s lives in the American South. The goal of their work was to bridge gaps between culture, language and perspective through digital storytelling and photography. On Sept. 28, at the end of the program, AUM and Carolina students displayed and discussed their work at the Pop-up Photovoice Exhibition at the Ackland Art Museum, hosted by UNC Global Affairs, with support from the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (DAMES) and the Gillings School of Global Public Health.
“Gracie truly grounded a lot of the students in realizing the trip wasn’t about a perfect understanding of something new to them, but rather a journey of going deeper into the nuances of collective women’s empowerment,” Caroline Sibley said. Sibley is an instructor with DAMES and helped facilitate the program in Jordan and North Carolina.
Exchange visitor programs like “Raise Your Voice,” as well as past programs in Finland, Ecuador and Japan, deliver on the University’s strategy to bring the world to Carolina. The U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, generously funded this program after selecting Carolina for the competitive grant and has renewed funding for the program in 2025-2026.
The photos displayed at the Pop-up Photovoice Exhibition are available to view here.
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