TEDxUTK and the Women’s Coordinating Council have created a partnership to bring TEDWomen to the University of Tennessee’s campus on Thursday, Nov. 29.
TEDWomen is a three-day conference discussing the power of women and girls to be creators and change-makers. The California main event will be held Nov. 28-30 and will be streamed during the UT event.
According to the TEDWomen website, “women the world over are no longer accepting the status quo. They’re rising up, breaking out and pushing boundaries. Whatever their focus and talent — business, technology, art, science, politics — these pioneers and their allies are joining forces in an explosion of discovery and ingenuity to drive real, meaningful change.”
The theme for this year’s TEDWomen event is “Showing Up,” celebrating how dynamic and diverse women are showing up to face challenges head on, all while empowering each other to shape the future.
Amanda Bryant, president of the Women’s Coordinating Council, said they “will be streaming speakers such as Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, and Dolores Huerta, founder of the United Farm Workers Union and dedicated civil rights activist.“
TEDxUTKWomen will premiere this year, but both TEDxUTK and the WCC plan to have the event once every year in conjunction with their major events in the spring like WCC’s Femissance and TEDxUTK’s general conference.
The kickoff event will only feature streams of speakers from TEDWomen’s Wednesday’s session, including percussionist Simona Abdallah, activist Ai-Jen Poo, environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson and mariachi band Flor De Toloache. According to event coordinator Malika Vohra, the group did not have enough time to invite speakers to make the event a more in-depth conference, similar to TEDxUTK’s Spring session.
Although UT’s event this year will only feature streamed speakers, event organizers hope to bring in community leaders to speak to their experiences leading local governments, small businesses, and non-profits as women.
“In addition to the streaming of TED Women, we will have campus organizations related to various women’s issues tabling at the event, so I am excited to hear from them,” Bryant said.
TEDxUTKWomen was a passion project for Vohra. She saw that TEDxUTK was newer on campus and that the WCC was very well established. So as an effort of outreach, she created the partnership and thought it would provide a good follow up to WCC’s “Take Back the Night” event.
Bryant looks forward to the now yearly event and “hopes that by collaborating with TEDxUTK on this event, we will be able to bring a more diverse range of voices to UT in one event than we typically do.”
Vohra shares that same enthusiasm.
“In the long term, we just want (TEDxUTK) events to grow, get more people to come and we want more people on campus to know who we are,” Vohra said. “We want to be able to work with not just UT’s campus but with the Knoxville community as a whole.
