Public Talk: Ahmed Badr

Oct. 18, 2019 at 6 p.m. in the Robert and Freda Harrison Auditorium, Giles Hall

Ahmed Badr is a 20-year-old writer, social entrepreneur, poet, and former Iraqi refugee working at the intersection of creativity, displacement, and youth empowerment. Badr founded Narratio, a platform for youth empowerment through creative expression. Narratio publishes works of art from all over the globe and hosts workshops centered around the power of storytelling and creativity. In the last three years, Badr's storytelling initiatives have reached over 20 million people across the world. Together with the Syrian artist and architect Mohamad Hafez, Badr co-founded UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage, a multi-media installation that remodels the homes of refugees inside a series of suitcases in an effort to humanize and give voice to a demographic that is often viewed in the abstract.
 
Badr is a junior at Wesleyan University, where he is a Fellow at the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. He is currently working on his debut book that focuses on the creative expression of refugee youth across the world, to be published by Andrews McMeel in 2020. Having spoken at the United Nations on more than ten occasions before the age of 20, his work has been featured and supported by the World Bank, SAP, Harvard University, Yale University, OECD, BuzzFeed Tasty, TEDxTeen, Instagram, NPR, Global Citizen, and others. This past September, Badr was selected by the Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake, as one of 17 UN Young Leaders for the Sustainable Development Goals. (from http://ahmedmbadr.com/ )

This project is supported in part by funding from the Mississippi Humanities Council, through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mississippi Arts Commission, a state agency, and in part, from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, The Starkville Area Arts Council, and The Criss Trust.