Theme: Humanity in Adversity

Over the past few years, we have seen people come together to overcome times of crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a prime example of that when people joined hands to ease oxygen supply, help the working class, and uncovered new methods to mirror a physically-distanced life to a normal one.

Injustices have been fought with unity. The Black Lives Matter protest, followed by an array of uprisings against institutional discrimination sprung up throughout the world.

TEDxNorthwesternUQatar aims to provide a platform for such ideas that allowed humanity to come together in adversity.

Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar
Al Rayyan, Ar Rayyān, 34102
Qatar

ADAN ALI

Adan is a Northwestern graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism and Strategic Communication. He attended the Medill School of Journalism at their campus in Doha, Qatar. He has a knack for automotive reporting and enjoys consuming and producing visual stories. Adan's reporting muscle is stimulated by developments in mobility and he is inclined towards non-political investigative journalism and advertising.

Alena Kishmaraia

Alena Kishmaraia, a life coach based in Doha with a background in psychology, focused on the concept of “looking for an enemy,” whether driven by hatred toward a specific group or society on the other side of the globe during the pandemic or targeting one’s self in other contexts. “I want the audience to feel safer and freer in this world, to start seeing the world not as a number of threats but as a set of opportunities,” she said and shared short exercises and thought-provoking questions to enable the audience to reflect on their outlooks on the world.

ARNAV RAMAN

Arnav Raman, an international economics major at Georgetown University in Qatar, discussed his experience with hardships and adversities in India, his home country. He shared stories about communities cooperating to overcome hardships during the pandemic but added that media coverage of such efforts is lacking. “It is unfortunate that in our times, bad media makes more headlines and is more appealing to people than good media,” Raman said of negative vs. positive coverage.

SAM MEEKINGS

Sam Meekings is an internationally-renowned poet and novelist, and a scholar of creative practices and processes with a special focus on digital and intersectional creative writing.