TED Talks and U.S. Human Rights
Earlier this year, the TED conglomerate was accused of deliberately avoiding speakers addressing abortion-related topics. In the initial coverage in the Nation and elsewhere, a TED spokesperson was quoted as saying that abortion is “more of a topical issue we wouldn’t take a position on,” and doesn’t fit into TED’s focus on “wider issues of justice, inequality and human rights.”
Within a few hours of the initial report, TED had backpedaled and indicated that abortion was certainly within its ambit. And it posted a request for speaker ideas. Of course, a number of folks immediately come to mind: from the academic ranks, perhaps Rebecca Cook and Joanna Erdman, co-authors of a new collection titled Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective, or Khiara Bridges, a law prof/anthropologist who has written about race and abortion; from the advocacy world, perhaps Nancy Northup or Janet Benshoof, both of whom work for abortion rights on the international stage. An on-line search suggests that none of these folks have had a chance to deliver a TED talk. Further, though the lag time between the speech’s delivery and the talk’s posting makes it hard to know what’s happened since February 2014, it appears that there is still no abortion-focused talk up on the TED website. (Two abortion-related talks are posted on TEDx, but these are from local programs that operate independently of TED).
TED has done a better job of addressing other human rights issues, including US issues such as the justice system and economic inequality. Still, TED doesn’t make it easy to find these talks, since there’s no search category on its site for “human rights.” Further, there are very few (and maybe no) talks with “human rights” in their title. Despite exciting developments on the U.S. human rights front, such as the growth of local human rights initiatives, it does not appear that a single one of the 1800+ TED talks has focused on these local responses to issues of “justice, inequality and human rights.”
The U.S. human rights movement has an abundance of eloquent speakers and many compelling stories. Whatever you think of the TED format, it certainly reaches people. The most widely viewed TED talks are watched by millions; the highest viewership for a single video is 15 million.
TED solicits speaker nominations through an on-line nomination form, linked here.
How might TED respond if they had an influx of nominations of highly qualified speakers from the U.S. human rights movement? And how might raising the profile of the movement in the TED space stimulate attention to, and dialogue regarding, US human rights?