TEDxJacksonville 2018 talks now available on YouTube

Talks from 'Exchange' conference posted to channel with 16M subscribers

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – If you weren't able to make the TEDxJacksonville conference in October -- or you want to share what you heard there with friends and family -- the talks are now available on the official TEDx Talks YouTube channel.

The TEDx talks from the 2018 conference, “Exchange: Conversations for the Curious,” have been produced and released to the public on the channel, which has more than 16 million subscribers.

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"The live audience at The Florida Theatre soaked up some incredible ideas at our conference -- and we're excited that those talks are now available to share with the world," said David Johnson, director of communications for TEDxJacksonville. "The speakers came from our own community and from as far away as Ireland and England. We're thankful to our partners, our volunteer team and our audience for making this possible."  

TEDxJacksonville is independently organized and licensed by TED. All TEDxJacksonville team members are volunteers who organize TED-like events throughout the city year-round. 

WATCH: A curated playlist of the talks 

Here’s a look at the talks and background on the speakers behind those talks from the 2018 conference:

  • “I’m Black, I’m a Minister and I’m Gay, Who Are You to Judge?” by Benjamin Carlton -- An author, activist, actor and minister, Carlton received his MBA from Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University before moving to Miami to pursue his career in accounting. While in Miami he co-founded the iconic BMe Community, a national movement of community builders that are led and inspired by black men.
  • “We Are All Witnesses” by Anne Driscoll -- An award-winning journalist, Driscoll has investigated wrongful convictions as senior reporter at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and as a 2013-2014 U.S. Fulbright scholar. She is the former project manager for the Irish Innocence Project at Griffith College Dublin. 
  • “Subculture of Giving: It’s a Lifestyle” by Iris Ivana Grant -- As CEO and president of the Genési Group Inc., Grant facilitates dialogue with for-profit and nonprofit entities in developing strategies that expose areas of benefit not readily identified through traditional models in philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, community engagement, fundraising and brand awareness. 
  • “Arts Activism in Simple Steps” by Dr. Jeffreen Hayes -- A trained art historian and curator, Hayes merges administrative, curatorial and academic practices into her cultural practice of supporting artists and community development. Among her many curatorial projects is “Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman,” which opens at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in October and continues through April 7, 2019.
  • “Ending Human Trafficking” by Kristin Keen -- Keen has spent her career creating opportunities through business for women caught in human trafficking to have access to a new life. She helped co-found Sari Bari, a thriving business that now employs more than 120 citizens of India. As the founder and executive director of Rethreaded, she has employed more than 35 women and provided more than 55,000 hours of work for survivors of human trafficking.
  • “Born Intersex: We Are Human!” by Mx. Anunnaki Ray Marquez -- Born intersex and assigned the wrong gender at birth, Marquez lived as female for the first 46 years of life before emancipating his authentic male gender in 2014. In 2018, Marquez received his birth certificate from the state of Colorado recognizing that his true biological sex is intersex and not a disorder. He became the third person to be recognized as intersex in the U.S. 
  • “The Power of Play” by Ash Perrin -- Drawing on his work as an entertainer and a clown who cares passionately about the health and happiness of children, Perrin launched The Flying Seagull Project more than 10 years ago. Since then, the group has worked with more than 100,000 children in hospitals, orphanages, deaf/blind schools, refugee camps and slums around the world.
  • “Examining the Unbuilt” by Philip Robbie -- As the National Design Director for RS&H, Robbie reflects not on the projects he saw to completion, but on those that remained unbuilt. This condition is common well beyond the architecture field: we all have projects left unbuilt, songs left unsung, stories left unwritten, and ideas that were undefended and never realized. Robbie argues that we must find the courage to build the unbuilt, write the unwritten, sing the unsung and defend the undefended.
  • “Driving While Poor” by Claudia Wilner -- At the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Wilner works to combat unlawful civil and criminal justice debt collection practices. For most of us, a simple traffic ticket is an expensive annoyance. But for millions of our fellow citizens -- disproportionately, low-income people of color subject to discriminatory policing policies -- it’s a financial calamity that creates a spiral of bad consequences. Wilner argues we must correct the inequities in our policing practices and our license revocation laws, which effectively criminalize poverty.
  • “The Promise of Nanomedicine” by Dr. Joy Wolfram -- Wolfram is an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Florida, where she leads the Nanomedicine and Extracellular Vesicles Laboratory. She also holds affiliate faculty positions at the Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas, the Department of Biology at the University of North Florida, and the Wenzhou Institute of Biomaterials and Engineering in China. Her goal is to bring new nanomedicines with increased therapeutic efficacy and safety to the clinic. 
  • “Find Your Rock: Why We Need Our National Parks” by Mark Woods -- Woods has been a columnist for The Florida Times-Union since 2001. After winning the Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship, allowing him to take a one-year sabbatical writing about the future of the national parks, he published “Lassoing the Sun: A Year in America’s National Parks” in 2016. It won the Florida Book Awards gold medal for nonfiction. Woods makes the case that preserving "America's best idea" is a constant battle -- one that has become even more urgent in the years since the National Park System turned 100 in 2016. 
  • “Have You Ever Seen a Planet with Two Suns?” by Brian Wu -- While in high school at the Horace Mann School in New York City, Wu developed an unquenchable thirst for anything related to aerospace engineering and astronomy. Wu worked on a graduate-level research project at the University of Florida, which led to the tentative discoveries of nine Giant Planets, two Brown Dwarfs, and the first low-mass Circumbinary Planet to be detected using Doppler spectroscopy. A circumbinary planet is a planet that orbits two stars rather than one. Wu continues in his ultimate goal of discovering potentially habitable Earth-sized planets.

The on-stage performances from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts dancers and John Lumpkin & the Covenant are also available on the TEDx Talks YouTube channel. A performance by Bold City Contemporary Ensemble is pending release.

The TEDxJacksonville team is currently planning for events for 2019.


About the Author:

A Jacksonville native and proud University of North Florida alum, Francine Frazier has been with News4Jax since 2014 after spending nine years at The Florida Times-Union.