Chelsea ShieldsSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

Shields is best known for her activism to combat religious gender inequality – specifically in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon Church) in which she was raised, though she is currently inactive and is no longer a believer in Mormon doctrine or scripture. Shields delivered a TED Talk on the topic of Religious Gender Inequality at the TED Fellows Retreat in September 2015. In November 2015, the talk was featured on TED.com under the title, "How I'm Working for Change Inside My Church."

Shields is also on the board of the Sunstone Education Foundation, an organization that discusses Mormonism through scholarship, art, short fiction, and poetry.

Shields’ academic work focuses on the concept of social susceptibility or why human bodies have evolved to be susceptible to social manipulation. She has spent 26 months over the course of a decade in the field in West Africa researching Asante indigenous healers,[20] ritual ceremonies, and biocultural interactions. Shields argued that grounding human behavior in social adaptations and viewing biocultural interactions in sickness and healing from an evolutionary perspective reveals important discoveries in placebo and ritual studies, religion, pain, stress, emotions, empathy, and social inequality. Shields spoke about how these sociocultural, biological and evolutionary concepts clash in a TED talk at the 2013 TED Fellows Retreat in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, where she used an Asante ethnographic case study of bonesetting to elucidate socially mediating pain mechanisms.

Shields was originally a cultural anthropologist and extended her studies to include a PhD in biological anthropology in order to explain the proximate and ultimate mechanisms of what was happening during ritual healing ceremonies.