1. Redefine Progress 2. Rethink Collaboration 3. Re-Energize our Community
“TED,” which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, is a global non-profit that celebrates innovation, creativity and learning through an array of talks given by experts from all walks of life. Founded in California in the 1980s, recent conference themes include Radical Openness, Rediscovering Wonder, What The World Needs Now, and The Substance of Things Not Seen – fascinating titles that house hundreds of addictive talks which are accessible online.
Originally based on the West Coast, TED has expanded to the international stage, hosting conferences across the world. Intellectuals of all trades, ages and nationalities are invited to relate their area of knowledge and specialty to the overarching theme of the conference – performing, speaking, philosophizing and engaging the audiences for eighteen minutes in an interactive, multimedia conference.
TEDx includes all the above characteristics, but with a twist: independently licensed, TEDx are events developed, planned and hosted by an independent group with permission from TED headquarters.
In the case of Connecticut College’s TEDx event, the independent group responsible for the event is the college’s students themselves.
This student-run collaborative project, in development since the fall and conceived last year, will culminate on April 14 in Evans Hall for an all-day event, lunch, snacks and brain-food included. Thirteen diverse speakers will draw from their respective fields to tackle and redefine the concept of progress.
Three of the speakers are Connecticut College professors: sociology professor Afshan Jafar, who will speak on women’s bodies, religious studies professor Eugene Gallagher who will lecture on American religious culture and millennialism and philosophy professor Lawrence Vogel, who will discuss the origins of modern progress.
Because progress can be viewed from many different angles, this process of re-thinking deserves an interdisciplinary approach. TEDx organizers have tracked down thirteen prestigious and unique speakers for an event teeming with intellectual possibility.
To risk overwhelming you with excitement, I will simply say: a philosopher, a filmmaker, a cancer research scientist, an anthropologist, a sustainable food entrepreneur, a sustainable architect, a sociologist, a religious studies expert, an extreme sports photographer, a non-verbal performance artist, a venture-capitalist, a historian and a bioethicist will all be on the same stage.
That being said, clearly all members of the campus community, regardless of major, minor or favorite color, can benefit from engaging with this exciting event.
I had the opportunity to sit down with a handful of the TEDx organizers – I say handful because they repeatedly emphasized that there were many more college students, professors, New Londoners, out-of-towners and friends of friends who made this TEDx possible. Spanning across majors, college campuses, state lines and even continents, Conn’s TEDx team has spent the past year networking in diverse avenues of academia, working with the college and collaborating with other student groups to bring TEDx to our campus.
The idea began when Aditya Harnal ’11 met a TED founder at a conference and discovered that organizations, groups and students could put on a TED event at their own college under the auspices of the TEDx program. I was especially excited to learn that the theme, Redefining Progress, was neither the brainchild of TED nor the plan of a specific individual: when Harnal returned to Conn for the 2011-12 year, he pitched TEDx to his peers. Interest grew and after a bout of brainstorming a group of students, many involved with CISLA, chose to focus on progress and modernity.
Harnel explained how “Visiting Professor [and CISLA fellow] Nauman Naqvi in particular inspired us to question the idea of progress.” Naqvi emphasized in their class how progress implicitly drives individuals; progress is our ever-constant (and ever-unreachable) goal, yet we have taken the definition and the perspectives on progress for granted.”
The students decided that the topic was “relevant enough to question progress through a variety of fields” and “broad enough to allow speakers to play around with it.” Sustainability, another focus of TEDx, is undeniably intertwined with progress (though some still declare it is a delusion or fantasy).
In TEDx, progress will be examined through over a dozen lenses – the more angles, the clearer the picture. The multimedia dynamic of the talks enhances this process; for instance, a performance piece called “Eco-centric” aims at “rethinking they way we connect and interact with the earth.”
Seniors Savitri Arvey and Katherine Shabb emphasized the multimedia, engaging nature of TEDx. The talk is not a speech; it is not an hour-long slide show or lengthy seminar. The talks are eighteen minutes, broken up into clusters to encourage discussion and interaction with the speakers and performers. All participants are given a badge that reads, “Talk to me about ___.” The blank can be filled by an interest, a person, a historical event, or a specific field. These badges inspire discussion, and spark much more conversation than the standard “Hello My Name Is Yolanda.”
“It’s creative, it’s witty, it’s visual, it’s engaging,” Shabb explains. “Those badges create connection.”
In addition to the intellectual connections at the actual event, TEDx has created a team and community of its own.
When I asked about the evolution of TEDx at Conn, Harnal, Arvey and Shabb emphasized how many people came together to make this Saturday’s event possible. People eager to attend, help and participate include students from neighboring colleges, New Londoners, high school students and professors.
The inclusive, democratic process is furthered by the way the team chose speakers: the initial TEDx group compiled a speaker recommendation form for students to fill out online. Harnal explained, “It wasn’t just the team choosing, it was us, professors, students, friends of friends, people in the community.”
The organizing group saw TEDx as a way to “stimulate a conversation that would turn to action.” Arvey points out that “there’s really no forum on campus that brings people together on campus from different fields to sit down, listen discuss and be inspired.” While Conn has inter-disciplinary majors and centers, there isn’t a place where all majors are invited to convene, even for a day, to inspire activism, create connections, and strengthen the CC community in a discussion-based environment.
The organizers also spoke of new connections with professors, new skills they learned from their peers, and a new TEDx community as the most positive aspects of their experience of putting the conference together.
“People have volunteered their time and their skills,” Harnal said, grinning as Shabb added, “Web-designers, film students, art students – this has been a collaborative process!” They mentioned one experience in particular, the communal effort in building the giant TEDx letters which have emblazoned the courtyard by Cummings as well as the Larrabee green, designed by sculpture student Rose Wall ’12.
“We built those letters together!” Arvey proudly said, her peers nodding alongside her. •
