Professor Dominic Bryan argues that nationalism is the problem, not the solution. The talk challenges nationalism, highlighting that the idea of the nation is a contemporary invention – an imagined community born of empires, resistance, and violence. Nations are complex, multicultural spaces, and global challenges such as climate change, poverty, and war demand global, humanitarian solutions.The talk explores the stories of the past, defined by prevailing views of what constitutes national history, which play a vital role in demarcating the boundaries of a nation. From the history taught in schools to the landscape of memorials, the museums visited, the endless historical TV dramas, and the flags and anthems that inspire loyalty – history shapes national identity. History and nationhood are woven into everyday life.Professor Bryan points out that nationalism remains extraordinarily divisive and lies at the heart of many global conflicts. Increasingly, inward-looking patriotism and protectionism have emerged, with politicians promoting loyalty to the nation and claims of national greatness as solutions to a wide range of problems.The talk calls for a critical understanding of nationalism, moving beyond narrow interpretations of history, and asks where a greater global sense of cohesion – based on common humanity and human rights – can be created. Professor Dominic Bryan is a distinguished anthropologist at Queen's University Belfast, renowned for his work on identity, ritual, and conflict in Northern Ireland. Over three decades, he has explored how symbols, parades, and public rituals shape group identity in contested civic spaces. His research has profoundly impacted public policy, contributing to the establishment of the Parades Commission and as Co-Chair of the Flags, Identity, Culture & Tradition Commission. Bryan's scholarship bridges anthropology, history, law, and conflict studies. His landmark monograph Orange Parades (Pluto Press 2000) remains a foundational text in understanding NI's symbolic landscape. Beyond academia, he engages with communities, policymakers, and media to foster dialogue & peacebuilding, exemplifying how ethnographic research informs real-world change. As mentor & thought leader, Prof Bryan continues shaping political anthropology & remains vital in discussions on identity, memory & reconciliation.This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

What happens when your biggest dream feels too risky to pursue, not because you lack talent, but because you don’t see anyone like you who’s done it before? In this deeply personal talk, Sev Ohanian traces his journey from growing up in a close-knit Armenian-American immigrant community in Los Angeles to finding his voice as a filmmaker – a journey that would eventually lead him to produce the most Oscar-nominated film of all time. Along the way, he shares how a “fake movie” made with family, friends, and zero budget became proof that the connections, resources, and support he thought he lacked were there all along. This talk is about storytelling, risk, and the quiet power of community.Sev Ohanian is an Academy Award–nominated and Golden Globe–winning producer and screenwriter, and founder of Proximity Media alongside Ryan and Zinzi Coogler. Since launching the company in 2018, Proximity has produced a wide range of event-driven projects across film, television, documentaries, and podcasts. Their most recent film, Sinners, grossed over $369 million worldwide and received a record sixteen Academy Award nominations, winning four. Proximity’s debut feature, Judas and the Black Messiah, earned six Academy Award nominations and won two. Sev has produced major projects including Creed III, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Marvel’s Ironheart and Eyes of Wakanda, the National Geographic docuseries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time. Sev is also known for co-writing Run, Missing, and Searching, and for producing those films alongside his wife, Natalie Qasabian. Searching was made for $880K and grossed over $75M globally.This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Through powerful storytelling, sharp insight, and real-world examples, this talk reveals how authenticity, empathy, curiosity, and human presence are becoming the rarest and most valuable traits of all. Audiences will leave with a new understanding of how to stand out—not by competing with machines, but by reclaiming the qualities only humans possess. Doug Zarkin is a 2026 Adweek Marketing Vanguard Award honoree, bestselling author of Moving Your Brand Out of the Friend Zone, and award-winning brand leader known for transforming brands into culturally relevant growth engines. Among his accomplishments, he scaled Victoria’s Secret PINK into a $400M+ lifestyle brand and led the rejuvenation of Pearle Vision. Creator of the “Thinking Human” philosophy, Doug explores how consumer psychology, storytelling, culture, and human connection influence decisions, shape loyalty, and drive lasting business growth and relevance. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

His TEDx talk—centers on helping people navigate uncertainty, overcome overthinking, and take action when the path forward isn’t clear. John Kundly is a keynote speaker, author, and licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.) with more than two decades of experience leading high-performing teams across the consulting, utility, and construction industries. Known for driving results while building strong, human-centered cultures, he brings real-world credibility to every stage. As the founder of Reach With John, he delivers high-impact keynotes and workshops focused on confidence, communication, and purpose. His work—and TEDx talk—centers on helping people navigate uncertainty, overcome overthinking, and take action when the path forward isn’t clear. John is the author of Within Reach: Your Journey to Being Likable, Hirable, and Mostly Sane, inspiring audiences to turn setbacks into strategic advantages. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

In the TEDx talk Listen Someone Into Existence, Doug explores the transformative power of truly listening to others. Through heartfelt storytelling and personal insights, he explains how genuine attention, empathy, and presence can make people feel valued, understood, and seen. The talk highlights how deep listening goes beyond simply hearing words — it can affirm a person’s identity, ease loneliness, and create meaningful human connection. Ultimately, Doug encourages audiences to practice intentional listening as a powerful act of compassion and recognition. Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA is a trusted advisor to founder-led companies, family offices, and privately held equity-backed companies facing governance drift and decisional drag due to unresolved human dynamics. He is an award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and highly experienced mediator. His work has included teaching life inmates to be peacemakers and mediators in maximum-security prisons and training analysts at the Congressional Budget Office on how to de-escalate members of Congress and staff. His website is https://dougnoll.com. His TEDx talk is about the transformative power of listening others into existence using two words: "You feel." This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Is reality TV ethical? Is everything you see on the screen real? Nia Sioux, who first captured audiences on the show Dance Moms at age 9, speaks about the importance of media literacy and how to ask questions while you are consuming types of media. Nia Sioux, who first captured audiences on Dance Moms at age 9, has grown into a multi-hyphenate talent—performer, actress, author, and advocate with 15M+ followers. She starred in Lifetime's Imperfect High, produced Facebook Watch's Dance with Nia, partnered with AdCouncil on mental health, and graduated from UCLA. Alongside collabs with brands from Aerie to Starbucks, she recently released her second book, Bottom of the Pyramid (Harper Horizon, Nov. 4), a memoir of resilience and self-discovery, which instantly hit the New York Times Best Sellers List! This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

After being rejected from medical school 50 times, Dr. Rene Roberts became the very doctor the system said she couldn’t be — and that experience became the foundation of her mission. In Who Gets to Heal?, she challenges the GPA- and test-driven admissions process that excludes the most compassionate, culturally connected healers society needs most. Because who gets to heal determines who gets healed. Dr. Rene Roberts is a Castle Connolly Top Doctor, board-certified Family Medicine physician, and keynote speaker on a mission to reform who gets to heal. Rejected 50 times from medical schools during the application process, Dr. Roberts knows what it means to be a "medical misfit." Rather than accepting defeat, she used rejection to fuel her advocacy for changing the rigid, test-score-driven admissions system that overlooks empathy, resilience, and lived experience. With nearly 14 years of clinical experience, Dr. Roberts currently serves underserved communities on Chicago’s south side and has become a trusted voice. She mentors aspiring physicians and champions a more inclusive approach to medical education. We will all need a healer at some point in our lives - and that reality makes Dr. Roberts' question all the more critical. In "Who Gets to Heal?", she challenges us to rethink how we select the next generation of doctors - because who gets to heal determines who gets healed. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

A cracked riverbed, a drought, people on the move — and the headline writes itself: climate change breeds war. Florian Krampe has spent his career in the places that story is told about, and he thinks it's not just lazy but dangerous. It turns people into "dominoes waiting to fall in a warming climate," strips them of agency, and quietly excuses us from looking at what actually drives violence. The threat he documents is real — water weaponized, wells destroyed, even dams seized — but the easy climate-conflict narrative, he argues, misreads it.His sharpest warning is for the people who show up to help. Sent to fix a water dispute in a divided city, the international community treated it as a plumbing problem and "solved" it — and made the conflict permanent instead. In fragile places, he says, water is never just water; it's power, legitimacy, and identity, and the well-meaning technical fix can harden a division into concrete and pipes. Why do good intentions so often boomerang?The turn is hopeful, and it's the part worth staying for: cooperation over scarce resources turns out to be far more common than conflict, and the same environment we fear as a trigger for war can become, in his words, "an unseen architect of peace." Krampe has watched it happen on the ground. His real claim is that the future isn't written by the climate — it's written by the story we choose to tell about it, and he's asking which one we'll pick. Dr. Florian Krampe is a Swedish-German political scientist specializing in peace and conflict research, environmental and climate security, and international security.Florian Krampe is the Director of Studies for Peace and Development at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Director of SIPRI’s Climate Change and Risk Programme. His research focuses on the interlinkages between climate change, security, and peacebuilding, with a particular emphasis on the ecological foundations for sustainable peace and the governance of renewable natural resources in post-conflict societies.Since joining SIPRI, Krampe has advised policymakers across multiple UN agencies and bodies, including the UN Security Council, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), the UN Peacebuilding Commission, UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), The World Food Programme (WFP), and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Krampe equally engages with a range of regional organizations such as the African Union, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), NATO, and the European Union. He regularly provides expert input and policy advice to governments, including Germany, United Kingdom, USA, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzlerland, South Korea on the interlinkages of climate, peace and security.Krampe is an Affiliated Researcher at the Research School for International Water Cooperation at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University. He served as a Specially Appointed Professor at the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability at Hiroshima University, Japan. From 2014 to 2016, he was Director of the Forum for South Asia Studies at Uppsala University, an interdisciplinary initiative supporting research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Robots in factories can afford to be stupid — we built a perfectly controlled world around them. Take one outside, into a forest or a field or "national security out in the dirt," and it falls apart. Rolf Mueller's work lives at that frontier: machines that have to be both genuinely nimble and genuinely smart in the messy real world. The catch is that fusing a capable body to a capable brain means searching a space so vast no supercomputer can brute-force it. His cheeky solution is intellectual-property theft — steal the answers from the one entity that already ran the search for billions of years: evolution.The thief's target is the bat. Mueller makes the case that bats are little superheroes carrying exactly the powers autonomy demands — sonar that brings its own light into total darkness, and powered flight no other mammal has — which is why more than one in five mammal species is a bat. But the detail that should stop you is how cheaply nature pulled it off. A bat matures in under a month on less biosonar data than you burn through your phone in a month, while training one outdated chatbot reportedly took thousands of times more. If we don't learn that kind of frugality, he warns, we'll drain the planet's power just to train chatbots — while a creature that hunts through the jungle with its eyes closed runs on almost nothing.Then he shows what his lab has actually built — and where it's headed. The talk earns one of the strangest closing images you'll see on a TEDx stage: a "robot breeding program." Watch to find out what gets bred, and why marrying a smart brain to a nimble body might be the only honest path to machines that can survive outside the lab. Rolf Mueller is the Raymond E. and Shirley B. Lynn Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, and the Director of the Bioinspired Science and Technology Center.Rolf Mueller's group seeks to develop robots that can mimic the superior sensing abilities and mobility of bats that are able to hunt in dense natural environments. Bats have the most complicated flight apparatus across all biological and engineered systems that fly with about 20 discrete degrees of freedom in each wing. Similarly to the complexity of the wings, bats have about 20 muscles on each ear that deform the shape of the pinna as it diffracts the incoming biosonar echoes. Biomimetic reproductions are an important tools for understanding these complex mechanical systems for mobility and sensing.Bats live in complex environments and hence receive complex ultrasonic echoes that are superpositions of contributions from many reflecting facets (e.g., leaves in a foliage). Such "clutter echoes" have eluded interpretation in technical sonar for many decades. However, the ongoing revolution in the capabilities of deep-learning methods provide a unique opportunity to extract patterns from data that have previously resisted interpretation. Mueller's group is exploiting deep-learning methods to extract valuable information on complex environments from these "clutter echoes". Furthermore, the research employs transparent AI approaches to gain insight into what the informative signal features. Based on these insights, highly efficient neuromorphic approaches to extracting sensory information can be implemented. To tie sensing and robotics, Mueller's group is working on deep reinforcement learning methods that can integrate the control of the complex soft-robotic ears with the sensing. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Growing up in a world that prioritizes fluency, stuttering can feel like a barrier to success. In this talk, I share how shifting the focus from fluency to authenticity changed the way I see my voice and myself. What happens when you stop chasing society’s definition of success and start creating your own? Kya is a student at University of Colorado Boulder majoring in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS). She is also a social media influencer and TikToker who uses her platform to raise awareness about stuttering and communication diversity. Drawing from personal experience, she challenges societal norms around fluency and success, encouraging others to embrace their voices and define success on their own terms. Her work focuses on confidence, identity, and breaking down stigma in everyday conversations. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx