Leacsaidh Marlow
On Wednesday 19th March, UoN Public Speaking Society hosted their TedX event at the university, platforming a brilliant range of talented public speakers, both students and external. NSTV and Impact attended the event to film and review the sessions – Impact’s Leacsaidh Marlow shares her thoughts on the experience…
Firstly, Public Speaking Society did an absolutely brilliant job of hosting the event – it was evidently well thought out, and the afternoon ran smoothly and effectively. There was a brilliant turnout, with many listeners attending to hear the talks and, despite the extensive running order, attention was maintained throughout – a credit to both the speakers and those responsible for the logistical planning.
The theme of this TedX event was ‘Mind the Gap’ – the intention being to see how speakers explore disparity and diversity, and the variety of talks was representative of a wonderful range of interpretations on this theme.
The event featured a selection of 9 speakers: Urzula Jachimowicz, Enoch Wong, Phil Edmundson, Faith Adeyemi, Chandrika Ghosh, Mohammed Musa, Brian Sanya Mondoh, Jonelle Awomoyi and Ben Heason.
There was a really great collection of speeches, spanning so many fascinating interpretations of the theme ‘Mind the Gap’, and it was really interesting to see how each of these chosen speakers drew on their own wildly different experiences to provide a response to this same initial statement. There were pieces on the importance of compassion, on fitting in and nonconformity, on human connection, language-learning and health inequality. The diversity of voices and talks was a real strength of this event, and showed a dedication to platforming speakers with a range of identities – particularly positive as it was noted that the society fell short on this diversity at last year’s event and so it was very encouraging to see that intentionality this time round. I did find some of the talks a little hard to follow as the theme had perhaps been taken a bit too abstractly to convey clear opinions, meaning speakers’ strength of conviction was lacking a little. However, the use of anecdotes was strong and this personal aspect was definitely engaging.
A speaker who particularly stood out to me was Chandrika Ghosh, who delivered the final talk of the afternoon. Her speech was a nuanced and captivating argument for the benefit and necessity of ‘code-switching’ – which refers to changing the way in which you speak depending on the company you are around. Typically regarded as a negative attribute, or seen as people/groups being forced to conform to the norm, Chandrika instead turned this argument on its head to persuasively assert that every single one of us uses code-switching without even realising, and that it is not oppressive but shows the beauty of social adaptability.
Overall, the event was fun and a great experience – it was clear that a lot of hard work had been put in by the TedX team to organise and run the afternoon, and of course from the speakers who did a great job of presenting. Impact can’t wait to see how the event evolves next year.
Leacsaidh Marlow
Featured image courtesy of Phil Desforges via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
In article image 1 courtesy of @uon_public_speaking_society via Instagram. No changes were made to this image.
In article image 2 courtesy of @uon_public_speaking_society via Instagram. No changes were made to this image.
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