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TEDxTufts is thrilled to present our 8th annual conference, "Undercurrents". This year's talks will delve into nuanced topics that ripple just below society's surface, paying particular attention to the underlying forces that propel our daily lives. Our speakers expose insidious injustices that tread dangerously under our collective radars and offer up innovative suggestions on how to keep future hopes afloat.
Undercurrents
2022
Talks:
Featured
Judge Birotte was appointed by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in July 2014. The son of Haitian immigrants, Judge Birotte graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law in 1991 and Tufts University before that.
Prior to his nomination to the federal bench, Judge Birotte served as the United States Attorney for the Central District for four years. During that time, he served on the U.S. Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, co-chairing its Terrorism/National Security Subcommittee and serving on its Border and Immigration Law Enforcement, Civil Rights, Cyber/Intellectual Property, Violent and Organized Crime, and White Collar/Fraud Subcommittees. He was also a Co-Chair of the multi-agency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force’s Consumer Protection Working Group.
Judge Birotte has also served as Inspector General of the Los Angeles Police Department, as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Central District, and as a Deputy Public Defender in Los Angeles County. He has also worked in private practice.
Audrey is a senior at Tufts in the combined BA/MA degree program in Philosophy. She has conducted research on the intersection between feminist ethics and Chinese philosophy and done extensive coursework in moral theory. This work inspired her to think critically about kindness as a virtue and to design and teach a course on the subject for the Tufts Experimental College. Teaching proved to her the importance in philosophizing about kindness and she looks forward to sharing her ideas with the TEDxTufts community.
Charming Dube grew up pinched between the regime of Robert Mugabe and the sanctions enacted by George W Bush on the Zimbabwean government. He is interested in the relationships between wealthy nations and international institutions on the one hand, and poorer countries on the other. This curiosity led him to two capstones at Tufts, his alma mater. The first examined the effect that bureaucratic rivalry between the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had on the country responses to AIDS in South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and the second considered the Zimbabwean response to COVID-19. In his free time, he enjoys reading biographies and is an avid player of the SimCity franchise.
Mark is Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. A native of Medford, Mark has deep ties to Tufts, having graduated from both the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Eliot Pearson nursery school. Prior to joining BU, Mark spent over three decades in the United States Foreign Service, serving in posts as diverse as Ambassador to Zambia, humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for refugee affairs, Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva and Dean of the State Department’s leadership school. Mark’s experience as a
Fletcher student volunteer helping refugees resettle in Boston helped spur his lifelong commitment to human rights and humanitarian affairs. As a diplomat, Mark has worked to advance the full spectrum of American interests, from security to global health to promotion of American businesses. But his interest in human rights has also been a unifying theme of his work. Mark is dedicated to encouraging young people to pursue careers in foreign affairs and humanitarian action and believes the United States and the international community require effective and innovative diplomacy to address emerging global challenges.
Melinda Latour is Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Arts, and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Tufts University. A scholar of early music and contemporary popular music, Latour has recently finished her first monograph, The Voice of Virtue: Moral Song and the Practice of French Stoicism, 1574-1652, which is in production with Oxford University Press and slated for a 2022 release. She has also published an edited collection (co-edited with Robert Fink and Zachary Wallmark), The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society. Latour’s scholarship has appeared in Music and Letters (2021), the Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music (2018), the Revue de musicologie (2016), and the Journal of Musicology (2015). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A native Californian, Latour earned a Ph.D. in Musicology from UCLA in 2016, an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from UC Riverside in 2009, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2002. She has received a range of prestigious awards and fellowships, including an American Council of Learned Societes Fellowship (2019-20), a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2018), and an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, held in residency at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, France (2015-16). She is delighted to share her passion for the intersection of music and philosophy for the Tedx community.
Dr. Amutah-Onukagha is the Julia A. Okoro Professor of Black Maternal Health in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Her current research interests include maternal health disparities, reproductive health and social justice, infant mortality and HIV/AIDS in Black women. Dr. Amutah-Onukagha also serves as the inaugural Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Public Health and Professional Degree Programs.
Ndidiamaka is the Principal Investigator of two multi-year studies on maternal mortality and morbidity, an R01 funded by National Institutes of Health and an interdisciplinary grant on health equity funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Additionally, she is a member of the MA-COVID 19 Maternal Equity Coalition and was honored with the American Public Health Association’s Maternal and Child Health Section’s Young Professional of the Year Award in 2019. She is in the 2020-2021 class of the top 40 under 40 Minority Leaders in Healthcare, an annual award given out by the National Minority Quality Forum. Ndidiamaka is a life-long member of the American Public Health Association and is currently the co-chair of the Perinatal and Women's Health committee in the Maternal and Child Health section. Finally, Dr. Amutah-Onukagha is the Founder and Director of the Maternal Outcomes for Translational Health Equity Research Lab, (MOTHER) a research lab comprised of 35 students from undergrad to postdoc with a keen interest in reducing maternal health disparities as experienced by Black women.
Nick Dorian is an ecologist, an educator, and a naturalist. He is a PhD student in Biology at Tufts University where he studies how solitary bees—those that don’t live in hives—cope with rapidly changing environments. Nick also co-founded and runs the Tufts Pollinator Initiative, which works to conserve urban pollinators through habitat creation, community & undergraduate education, and ecological research.
Rastislav Janardan is a First-Year in the Combined Degree program with Tufts University’s College of Arts and Sciences and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. They study Studio Art and Art History, with a growing focus on integrating contemporary art-theoretical scholarship with their art practice which focuses on Painting and Mark-Making. Having trained in the Sitar for 14 years, Rastislav was a National Scholar under India’s Centre for Cultural Research and Training and grew up learning from an ever-evolving group of musicians, artists and designers who are, in part, the focus of their Tedx talk.
Senjuti works at COMSPOC, supporting the space operations community to address current and emerging challenges in the space environment. Prior to this, she has worked as an Expert for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Emerging Tech Division and also taught international law for the Oxbridge summer program at Harvard Law School. She completed her Master's in International Law from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA specializing in international law and technology policy, with a particular focus in space law, laws of the sea and cyber security. Her thesis on space sustainability was selected for presentation at the 70th International Astronautical Congress, 2019. She is actively involved with the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) and International Institute of Space Law (IISL).
Senjuti is a trained lawyer from India where she practiced law and worked as a judicial law clerk at the Hon'ble High Court of Delhi. She is a graduate of ILS Law College, Pune.
Shania Cox is a freshman at Tufts University. As an autistic person, she has experienced many situations in which her identity was questioned. She believed that a big reason for this was the stereotypical representations of autistic people in the media. This is what sparked the idea for her TED talk. Through her talk, she hopes to challenge the current media that exists regarding autism and make people question the media that they are absorbing. Beyond her talk, Shania hopes to continue advocating for autistic voices during her time at Tufts and as a potential career venture.
Tamar Bresge is an artist and writer from Toronto, Canada. She works primarily in literary art, performance, and photography. Her work picks at questions of semiotics, hierarchies of bodies, and the location of the self. Informed by her own experience of blindness and vision, she questions the language used around sight, observation, perception, and self-knowledge. She likes to play in the sandbox of fantasy and fiction, and is obsessed with the metonymic chain of being.
She is currently an MFA candidate at the SMFA at Tufts, with an upcoming thesis show in May 2022.