talks
As a speaker coordinator at the Oslo Freedom Forum, I worked with activists and thinkers to help them tell their stories. Creating a talk involves collaborative in-depth interviewing, drafting, editing, and speech coaching. The speakers’ ideas and language were at the core, and together we discovered how to craft a narrative that could speak to the forum’s audience and, hopefully, spark change. Below are a selection of stand-out talks that I worked on.
But before that: I’ve done some public speaking of my own, as well. Here are some links to panels I moderated about the war on drugs at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2019 and about surveillance tech and human rights at RightsCon 2019. I also spoke on stage briefly at the Oslo Freedom Forum in New York, joining Mexican activist Lisa Sánchez on stage to discuss HRF’s war on drugs research. And I was on WPR’s Trend Lines podcast every Friday from April to August 2020 as a panelist.
Fatemah qaderyan, “The Afghan Dreamers”
Fatemah’s robotics team, the Afghan Dreamers, rose to international attention in 2017, when the girls were denied visas to attend a competition in the United States. The incident brought her story to light: As a girl living in the shadow of the Taliban, Fatemah devoted herself to her education and to creating a new future for herself and her country via tech.
Esther Htusan, “Burma’s Broken Promise”
Esther is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who provided consistent coverage of the country’s ethnic conflicts and the Rohingya genocide, even as the country became more repressive and undemocratic. In this talk, she highlights the parallels between today’s government and the military regime she grew up with in the 1990s, and offers testimony of the Rohingya crisis.
Emmanuel Jal, “The Art of Forgiveness”
Jal is an experienced speaker who spoke at OFF in New York in 2018 about reconciliation and forgiveness, drawing from his experience as a child soldier in southern Sudan in the early 1980s.