UNC-Jordan exchange raises women’s voices
In this UNC Global Affairs program, students made connections and worked together on a photo research project.
Listening to a local female producer at a film studio in Amman, Jordan, Gracie Young ’26 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 in Jordan. The program was organized by UNC Global Affairs and funded by a competitive grant from the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan.
During the first half of the program in May, the Morehead-Cain scholar and other Carolina students traveled to Jordan to experience aspects of women’s lives in Jordanian society. The Sijal Institute, a close partner of AUM, hosted the students and organized excursions, activities and lectures that enhanced their experience.
The group used a research method known as photovoice, said associate professor Alexandra Lightfoot of the Gillings School of Global Public Health’s health behavior department, who traveled with the participants. Photovoice is a way to describe what one sees or understands about a community through photography. 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,” said Young.
Young and her AUM partner created profiles of Jordanian women who established innovative spaces for other women to express themselves. The filmmaker Young admired runs her own studio, providing women in the local film industry with opportunities to produce their own work, which she says is enormously difficult there because of 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.
After the exchange visit to Jordan, Young decided to stay for a summer internship with a local nonprofit that provides legal consulting and research for larger, global nonprofits.
This September, AUM students traveled to North Carolina to rejoin their Carolina partners for the second part of the exchange. They revisited their photovoice projects in Jordan and expanded their scope to include aspects of women’s lives in the American South.
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 College of Arts and Sciences’ Asian and Middle Eastern studies department 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,” said Caroline Sibley, a DAMES instructor who helped with 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, renewed funding for the program in 2025-26.
View photos displayed at the Pop-Up Photovoice Exhibition.
