Speakers to discuss climate change
Local journalist Margie O’Brien recently participated in an event with URI’s Women in Business organization. Photo from golocalprov.com
The 2021 TEDxURI will include two fully-virtual shows with numerous speakers covering the topic of “decoding the language of climate.”
The TEDxURI event, which takes place every year at the University of Rhode Island, will take place virtually this month due to COVID-19. The organizers modeled this event after the TED organization at their TED Countdown event this past October, a virtual event that included talks from various speakers.
“We have a series of speakers, from a variety of disciplines, many from URI, some from outside URI, addressing in one way or another, concerns about the climate crisis,” Karl Aspelund, the show’s manager and coach, said.
There are also musical guests that will be performing during the shows in between speakers.
This event has been in the making for about a year now, as it was canceled completely last year due to COVID-19. According to Aspelund, things have been in the works since then, but speakers have been practicing and started recording their talks for the past couple weeks.
“The recording has been going on for a couple of weeks now,” Aspelund said. “The way [TEDx events] work is each speaker is coached by a member of the team. So I and the other coaches each have three or four speakers that we work with before their performance. [For the actual performance], they are all in a place of their own choosing. They’re not on a stage somewhere in the way TEDx talks would be.”
There has already been a large number of students who have registered for the event, and TEDxURI organizer Maling Ebrahimpour, who is also the dean of the college of business and the Alfred J. Verrecchia–Hasbro Inc. Leadership Chair in Business, expects a lot more to follow.
“We opened the registration three days ago, we have 500 people registered,” Ebrahimpour said. “We expect more actually because you don’t have to leave your room.”
Ebrahimpour said that the talks are going to be a bit shorter than average, between five and seven minutes, while a normal TED Talk is around 15 minutes.
There will be about 15 presenters speaking at the event. Due to this large number of speakers, the people involved in the event made the decision to create two shows that will be taking place on two separate days.
“What happened was when we started talking to the various scientists, presenters and interested parties, we found that we had more talent than we could put into one show, and the talent was so good that we could not stand the thought of leaving anybody out that we talked to,” Aspelund said. “It’s going to be a great show, a great two shows.”
There has been plenty of preparation put into this event, with the organizers and speakers working hard for months to create an educational and inspirational show for students. Ebrahimpour said that his main inspiration for putting on the event has been helping students gain a better perspective on life and what it has to offer.
The speakers all come from different backgrounds and have different types of knowledge to share.
“What a student should be looking for is inspiration from these people,” Aspelund said. “They should be looking for ideas about what they can do to help, and they should be looking for models for what they themselves can be, in whatever field they are in.”
The first part of the TEDxURI event will take place on March 20 and the second will be on April 3. Both start at 7:30 p.m. You can register to attend TEDxURI here online.