A West Virginia University alumna with a passion for storytelling and cultural connections has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Clara Haizlett from Bethany is among approximately 2,200 college students and recent graduates selected for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the U.S. government’s premier international exchange initiative.
Haizlett will travel to Jordan at the end of August to embark on a filmmaking project that explores end-of-life rituals and aging in the country. Her interest in Jordan sparked during a visit in 2017 when she was a Boren Scholar at WVU.
“I have spent so much time studying Arabic, specifically Jordanian Arabic, so I knew that I wanted to go back to Jordan,” Haizlett said. “I also wanted to combine these language skills and the documentary filmmaking skills that I developed post college into one project.”
Growing up with dreams of global exploration, Haizlett chose West Virginia University for its international studies program and extensive resources for education abroad.
“Freshman year, I came in with the idea that I was going to take advantage of all the resources that this University offers to study abroad because it’s pretty incredible,” she said.
During her time at WVU, Haizlett studied in Mexico, Bahrain, and secured a Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Tangier, Morocco. She remarked, “I spent half of my time at WVU traveling and studying abroad.”
Eager to share her experiences and those of the individuals she encountered during her travels, Haizlett created a podcast for her senior thesis. The project, titled “Sandstone,” featured 12 episodes that explored connections between the Arab world and Appalachia, capturing the human elements of shared experiences.
Haizlett said, “It highlighted those more human elements of how we relate to people who seem so different from us.” The podcast included interviews with people from West Virginia and the Middle East, sharing their stories of life, love, and religion.
Inspired by her work on “Sandstone,” Haizlett has decided to pursue a career in storytelling through film. In the upcoming nine months in Jordan, she plans to reconnect with Jordanian culture and rituals.
“My hope in Jordan is to kind of dive deep into how Americans might reevaluate our approach to aging and end of life in order to care for elders and ourselves in a more ethical, more fulfilling way,” she explained.
She expressed concern over the disconnection many Americans feel regarding traditions of death and elder care, a sentiment rooted in her own experiences observing her grandmothers age in West Virginia.
“There are extensive traditions related to death and dying in Appalachia, but at this point those practices have largely been displaced by modernization and medicalization,” Haizlett noted. “My hope with this project is to provide a cross-cultural experience for audiences and inspire viewers to reconnect with their own cultural practices, wherever they may come from.”
With aspirations to create a multipart project capturing comparative studies of aging and end-of-life traditions through film, Haizlett is enthusiastic about her upcoming journey.
“I’m really excited to go back to Jordan, especially with a purpose in mind, a purpose that I feel very passionate about,” she said. “To have this affiliation with Fulbright and just the opportunity to pursue this project, I’m really excited about that.”
Students at WVU receive support from the ASPIRE Office as they seek nationally competitive awards like the Fulbright scholarship .
