Theme: Resilience

We are very excited to welcome you to TEDxUppsalaUniversity! This event has the theme Resilience and will provide a platform to speakers from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds to share their creative ideas and stories around this concept. Today’s societal challenges are global, interdependent and increasingly complex. They require systems, societies and individuals to be able to respond with greater flexibility, speed and creativity. In the face of so many challenges how resilient are we really?

Uppsala Konsert & Kongress
Vaksala torg 1
Uppsala, 753 31
Sweden

Walid Al-Saqaf

Walid Al-Saqaf describes himself as a “Yemeni activist trying to use technology and journalism to advocate for human rights in general and freedom of expression in particular”. Combining experience in software development, journalism and academic research, he will speak on the topic of ‘Rising to the occasion and fighting for your ideals, and overcoming life's difficulties in life through resilience’. Al-Saqaf’s efforts in supporting democracy through technology won him a TED senior fellowship in 2012 and Örebro University's 2010 Democracy Award. He is currently teaching journalism at Örebro University and focuses his research on internet censorship.

Filippa Bergin

Filippa Bergin will conceptualize resilience as “a new description of the economic world” in her talk. After more than 15 years of experience within the field of sustainability (working with organizations including the World Health Organization, Amnesty International, and International Human Rights Law Group, to name a few) Bergin, a lawyer by training, founded Invest in Change in 2011. Analyzing investments into business models, the company strives to provide a net positive impact on the world. Creating models for analysis, portfolio management, and corporate governance, her work also aims to manage the risks and opportunities tied to sustainability. Applying research for action today, Bergin focuses on creation and innovation in the effort to realize a prosperous, sustainable future.

Sven Heijbel

Sven Heijbel, a 26-year old entrepreneur and psychology student, is passionate about happiness and business development. He co-founded two companies, Wake Up Call, offering educational services and the strategy agency Global Focus. The core of his work the past six years has been to change people’s behaviors and attitudes. Additionally, Heijbel conducts individual coaching and together with his teammates in Global Focus, strategic counseling for businesses and organizations. His talk is focused on ideas and tools for building resilient happiness, drawing from his experiences of traveling the world while making a documentary on the subject.

Timothée Parrique

Timothée Parrique describes himself as an explorer in the field of economics, passionate about philosophy and the history of ideas. Disappointed by the failure of mainstream economics in addressing the issues of social and environmental justice, Parrique’s vision of economics evolved from a mathematical quest for an efficient “how”, to a humane journey of discovery for a fair “why”. 24 years old, he is a course coordinator for "The Global Economy – Environment, Development, and Globalisation" at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), a unique student-initiated and primarily student-led university center and meeting place for students, researchers, and teachers from Uppsala University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Parrique’s talk will focus on the importance of economics in the pursuit of sustainability.

Brian Palmer

Brian Palmer is a social anthropologist and scholar of religion at Uppsala University, whose talk will focus on ‘Extreme Courage: How Heroes Teach Us Faith.’ He lectures in Sweden and internationally more than fifty times per year, with a focus on civic courage and what Susan Sontag calls ”the simultaneity of wildly contrasting human fates.” Palmer gathers wisdom from heroic lives and applies it to everyday questions of surviving as an idealist in an unforgiving world. What can our bravest contemporaries and fallen friends teach us about how to live? At Harvard, his courses on courage and engagement attracted as many as 600 students per term and he was voted the university’s best lecturer. Palmer recently co-created the Raoul Wallenberg Calendar, a portrayal of 365 heroes that is being serialized on Radio Sweden on each day of 2013. His next book together with Ola Larsmo, "101 historiska hjältar" ("101 Historical Heroes"), will be published this month.

Lina Thomsgård

Lina Thomsgård is a PR consultant and founder of the social media innovation Rättviseförmedlingen (Equalisters), an award winning equality project involving 50 000 people spreading knowledge and bringing gender balance and norm breaking into media representation. Through Rättviseförmedlingen, Thomsgård has spent more than three years organizing resilience, by using social media to transform frustration with gender inequalities into a positive force of change. Gathering more than 50 000 people on social media, Rättviseförmedlingen has used really simple tools to make a true change when it comes to gender equality in Swedish media. This award winning innovation is about to move abroad, and speaking on the topic “Don’t endure – organize! How to crowdsource gender equality”,Thomsgård will talk about how it all started and share some of their key learnings.

Johan Rockström

The Executive Director of Stockholm Resilience Centre, Rockström is a professor in Environmental Sciences at Stockholm University and the leading scientist of the global ‘planetary boundary’ research. His 2010 TEDGlobal talk “Let the environment guide our development” has almost 400,000 views on the TED website. With decades of experience in sustainability, developmental and environmental research, as well as outstanding analysis and forecasts of mankind’s development, Rockström's talk at TEDxUppsalaUniversity will approach the topic of ‘resilience’ from a scientific perspective. Based on his and Anders Wijkman’s recent book “Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries”, it will focus on the major sustainability challenges facing humanity today.

Anders Wijkman

Anders Wijkman is the Co-President of the Club of Rome, an advisor at the Stockholm Environment Institute and a former member of the European Parliament. As an opinion leader and author, he has a strong focus on climate change, social justice and circular economy. Throughout his varied and accomplished career, Wijkman has been deeply involved in issues of environment and development, and his talk will focus on potential solutions to the challenges laid out in his and Johan Rockström’s book “Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries”.