Email: Amelia.shaw@yale.edu
Ameila Shaw hails from a small town in upstate New York. She is the youngest of five children, a fact that has likely contributed to her love of adventure and her adaptability to culture. Much of her family lives in Barcelona, Spain, and Amelia spent much of her childhood between Catalonia and New York. At the age of 18, she lived for a year in Switzerland as an exchange student.
In college at Yale, Amelia studied Anthropology and spent nine months in East Africa studying language and Kenyan politics at the University of Nairobi. There, she volunteered on a variety of community theater projects promoting health and peaceful social change. After receiving her Bachelors degree in Anthropology in 1997, Amelia spent time working for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and later on an environmental conservation project in a small village in the mountains Mexico. This experience led her into public health, as she spent the bulk of her time investigating coping strategies of female-headed households in rural areas. Many of the obstacles that women faced in terms of raising and maintaining a family revolved around access to family planning and educational opportunities for women.
Amelia returned to Yale in 2000 to pursue joint Masters degrees in African Studies and Epidemiology and Public Health. Her interest in the cultural communications aspect of public health effectively combines a passion for promoting cultural understanding and affecting positive social change to raise health outcomes. During the summers, she has worked in Kenya and Tanzania as a journalist and production assistant for a variety of national radio programming on HIV/AIDS and family planning. She also coordinated a documentary film project in Haiti covering the lives of people living with HIV as part of a national anti-stigma campaign. Presently, she works on the foreign beat as a reporter for WYBC radio in New Haven, Conn.
Amelia’s interest in Saudi Arabia at this time stems from her desire to understand the paradoxical relationship of co-dependence and antagonism that has developed between the American and the Arab public over issues of oil, Iraq, terror and Palestine. It is her view that ignorance and lack and understanding in US media representations of conflict have created pejorative cultural mythologies that deny the basic humanity of all people. She looks to this trip as a way to overcome personal ignorance on many aspects of Saudi culture, and as a way to use film and print media to help other Americans come in better contact with Saudi culture and overcome their ignorance and misunderstandings. She also hopes to transmit some of the humanity of American culture to Saudi individuals she meets. Amelia is deeply thankful to Faisal Al-Saud and his family for extending her this rare invitation to visit such an important and fascinating land.
Email: Amelia.shaw@yale.edu