It’s that wonderful time of the season — the time when the Ohio State community interacts with our organization, TEDxOhioStateUniversity, through the booths administered by the PR committee. On Tuesday October 23rd, the PR committee organized a booth promoting FUSE at the Ohio Union. FUSE is the theme of our main event in the spring, and today’s booth is just one of the many activities the PR committee has in store for the rest of the season.
Since FUSE will be the primary focus for most of the PR organized booths; our booths will integrate some form of FUSE into the activities offered at our booths. For Tuesday’s booth, we wanted to visually portray how the Ohio State community is a FUSE-ion of individuals from different communities. The Ohio State community should grow to represent a larger variety of identities, but it’s important to see how diverse the community already is in order for the level of diversity to grow.
Living the college experience at such a huge campus is quite overwhelming. It’s easy to fall into the paradigm that you are not apart of any community here on campus. You may even feel the pressures of feeling that you’re the only representative of your community in this vast network of cultures. On October 28th’s booth, we had roamers of the Union place a pin over the community in which they came from — to pinpoint a location in order to display that a certain community is being represented here in the university’s social sphere. This provided visitors of our booth a chance to not only interact with the awesome TEDxOhioStateUniversity members, but also a chance to understand their place in the campus culture. They can leave their mark on our board, build connections with our members, and learn about what TEDxOhioStateUniversity can offer to enhance their buckeye experience.
Through this PR booth, we learned that the Ohio State community is home to individuals who come from various parts of the globe. The community truly is a conglomerate of identities and within such identities, they have their own intersectionalities. Each person’s identity offers important cultures and insights to the Ohio State community which heightens the cultural impact our community can offer. Each person is an emblem of their chosen community, and this activity portrayed how beautiful the conglomerate of identities is. We learn new things about identity, intersectionality, culture, and way of life through each other. At our booth, we got to meet incredible individuals from various background, who each offered something inspiring to our campus culture.
Interestingly, we are not only limited to the communities which we came from, but we are also able to create our own communities. Our independently organized TED events are a perfect example of how new communities can be made on campus. Our events amplify voices from various communities, which results in the formation of a community in the audience. In a single event, where ideas are shared by a speaker, results in those ideas being absorbed by the audience, therefore, an intimate experience is created. That intimate experience is only shared with those in the audience, and that audience for a short period of time can bond with one another to create a community.
TEDxOhioStateUniversity strives to create an inclusive community through our events. The PR booths promoting our events allow people to understand our organization, and become acquainted with the events we have to offer. Come see us at our next booth November 2nd! Surprise, it won’t be about FUSE, but it will be promoting Nourish — our FIRST EVER Salon event. If you couldn’t make it to our FUSE booth, our Nourish booth will be a sight to see. So make sure to follow TEDxOhioStateUniversity’s social media accounts to get the details for our upcoming events!