Sharon Ajibade

Educator/Teacher, Musician, Student, Writer/Editor

Sharon Ajibade is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University and the organizer and licensee of TEDxAmes. Her research centers on voice: how marginalized people use digital spaces to assert their agency and amplify their voices, and how AI shapes writers' thinking, emotions, and identity, particularly bilingual writers. She teaches undergraduate writing at Iowa State. Originally from Nigeria, she founded the Royal Air Initiative, an advocacy platform for girls’ education, and is a debut novelist.

Education, especially for girls; writing and the power of voice; and creating spaces where people from different backgrounds can share ideas.

What a society knows depends on whose voices it hears. When people tell their stories in their own words, languages, and accents, they add knowledge the world would otherwise never have.

African and Diaspora Studies, AI and writing, digital media, editing, education, professional communication, public speaking, Rhetoric, voice and agency, writing

TED talks have been part of my life for as long as I can remember, but during my master’s studies, they became something I kept going back to watch again and again. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” was one of the first talks I fell in love with. Talks on feminism and spirituality opened new ways of thinking for me and shaped my writing during my coursework. While I was taking the ALX Virtual Assistant program, TED talks were part of how I learned. Two have stayed with me: Carol Dweck’s talk on the power of “not yet” and Angela Duckworth’s talk on grit. Their ideas still shape how I work today, including how I am planning this event. TED has always been my go-to for inspiration, wisdom, and something to aspire to. As a student of rhetoric, I believe deeply in communication and the power of words. Rhetoric is the art of helping people understand one another, and TEDx is one of the best examples of it: big ideas, shared simply and powerfully. I wanted to bring TEDx to Ames because this community deserves its own stage. The people of Ames are doing remarkable things, and their ideas deserve to be heard here at home and around the world.

I sing, I write, and I love to cook and bake. People are usually most surprised to learn that I can clean and cut a whole chicken or fish myself and pound yams with a mortar and pestle.