TEDxPorthtowan Women

Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check the event website for the latest lineup.

• Afnan Towheed

  Afnan Towheed is a final-year law student whose work sits at the intersection of international women's rights law and the lived realities of women in the Global South. Raised across two continents, she examines how legal frameworks designed in one part of the world land (or fail to land) in another. Her interest lies in how international conventions imagine their "default" subject, and what changes when law is built from local context outward rather than imposed from above. She brings the perspective of a generation questioning inherited frameworks and looking for ones that recognise every woman, including those outside formal systems.

• Caroline Coleman

  Caroline Coleman is the mother of Kyle, her non-speaking autistic son and has spent more than three decades exploring what communication looks like when verbal language is beyond reach. Her journey, shaped by lived experience, a deep curiosity about consciousness, and her introduction to lucid dreaming and altered states of awareness, led her to discover forms of connection with Kyle that transcend speech. Caroline is the founder of the Autism–Telepathy Conversations Community, a Facebook group with worldwide participation, and teaches online Dream Telepathy courses and Lucid Dream workshops across the UK. Caroline and Kyle's story features in both series of The Telepathy Tapes podcast, and they were recently filmed for an upcoming documentary by director Ky Dickens. Her work advocates for a broader understanding of communication as a spectrum that may extend well beyond verbal expression.

• Caroline Gayle-Dunne

  Caroline Gayle-Dunne is a combined counselling psychotherapist, mental health practitioner, and community leader whose career spans more than three decades working at the intersection of mental health, trauma, and social justice. She began her professional life as a mental health nurse before specialising in domestic abuse and later in substance use, addiction, and complex trauma, working grassroots for many years in some of Cornwall's most deprived communities. Caroline is the founder and Director of Inspiring Women's Network and leads Still I Rise, a youth empowerment group for children and young people of colour. She has also developed GROWTH, a wellbeing and health framework drawing on her years of clinical experience and expertise, delivered through training, coaching, and consultancy. Her work is rooted in feminist principles and a sustained commitment to amplifying the voices of women and communities too often left at the margins of mainstream support.

• Dr Lisa Turner

  Dr Lisa Turner holds a PhD in mathematical modelling and spent her early career as an engineer before moving into the field of personal transformation, where she has worked for more than 20 years. Her interest in the structure of human behaviour grew out of her own lived experience as a survivor of coercive control, which she escaped in her teens. She now builds AI tools designed to detect the subtle linguistic patterns of manipulation, gaslighting, and workplace harm - applying systems thinking to dynamics that have traditionally been considered too nuanced to measure. Her work sits at the intersection of engineering, psychology, and survivor-led research.

• Emily Coon

  Emily Coon is a sustainability leader and strategist based in Cornwall, currently working as Sustainability Manager at St Austell Brewery. Named in the Cornwall 30 Under 30 for 2026 and edie's 30 Under 30: Class of 2025, she has built a reputation for driving genuine cultural and environmental change without relying on formal authority. Trained in translating climate science into real-world action, and holding degrees in business and economics, she has spent five years working inside complex organisations to shift behaviours, build collective ownership, and make sustainability feel relevant at every level, not only at the top. In this talk, she brings together that personal history, her professional experience, and a broader argument about the leadership the climate era actually depends upon.

• Jo Davies

  Jo Davies has spent 35 years working for social justice in the community and voluntary sector, with a particular focus on children, young people, and families. She is the CEO of WILD Young Parents, the largest young parent organisation in the UK, which she leads as part of a national movement for intergenerational change for young parent families. With over two decades of charity leadership and strategic partnership roles across health and social care, her work spans safeguarding, collaborative systems change, and advocacy at national and parliamentary level. She began working with young parents 27 years ago, and has since worked alongside more than 20,000 young parent families. In this talk, she brings that experience, and the story of one young woman called Lily, to bear on a simple but urgent question: why, when we know exactly what young mothers and their babies need, do we keep refusing to give it to them?

• Lauren Gauge

  Known for her sharp humour and raw, lyrical storytelling, Lauren Gauge’s performances have garnered international awards (Best Actress in Russia & Grand Prix in Belgium) and her performances have appeared at Soho Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh Fringe, the Minack Theatre and Tate Galleries. Her work blends poetry, beatboxing, music, dance, and comedy to showcase nuanced stories about experiences that resist easy categorisation. She trained in stand up comedy at Soho Theatre. Her creative and academic practices consistently centres marginalised voices and interrogates the structures - social, relational, and political- that constrain how people live and love. Alongside her artistic work, Lauren founded a business consultancy at twenty-five, working across entertainment PR, business development training and creative strategy. In this talk, she brings the same unflinching honesty she applies to the stage to one of the most intimate questions she knows: what does it really mean to connect and commit to another person, and to yourself, at the same time? What if relational intimacy wasn’t just reserved for our romantic relationships and could transform how we lead, love, and live?

• Natalie Nicholas

  Natalie Nicholas is a DJ, event producer, and music advocate based in Cornwall. Performing as DJ Natz, she is the founder of Freestyler Events, the grassroots event brand behind the annual Kernowtopia festival. She is also the founding director of Amplify, an organisation that uses electronic music to inspire and engage young people. Her work sits at the intersection of music, community, and advocacy, with a particular focus on creating visibility and opportunity for women and gender-diverse artists in spaces not traditionally built for them. In this talk, she draws on her own experience behind the decks, in the classroom, and on the festival field to examine the structural forces that keep women out of electronic music and to make the case for why that needs to change.

• Rebecca Hunt

  Rebecca Hunt works in nature-based solutions for the National Landscapes Association, convening the UK’s 46 National Landscapes (AONBs) on innovative green finance and large-scale nature recovery projects. After a career spanning movie publicity, business development, and marketing overseas, she moved into conservation to help reshape how people connect with the natural world. Her work explores the psychology of belief, environmental storytelling, and the cultural narratives that shape climate action. Rebecca is particularly interested in how ancient relationships with nature may offer insight into rebuilding belonging and responsibility today. She holds a bachelor's degree in History and a Master of Science, a combination that shapes how she thinks about the present-day climate conversation: with one eye on ecological evidence and the other on what earlier cultures understood about living alongside the natural world.

• RED -

  Red is an artist, researcher, and co-founder of Becoming Arethusa CIC, an arts-based organisation that uses trauma-informed creative practice to amplify the voices of women impacted by domestic abuse, exhibiting pieces to ignite reform from within the family justice system. Her work sits at the intersection of personal experience, visual advocacy, and social justice, grounded in research frameworks including the Power Threat Meaning Framework. She holds MA’s in Painting and Curating Visual Culture, and has received Arts Council England support for her practice, including a residency in Mexico City. Red co-facilitates art therapy with Integrative Art Psychotherapist Biddy Daniel, enabling women to transform lived experience into visual narratives with full agency over how their work is used and shared. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

• Ruth Etches

  Ruth Etches is a registered Nutritional Therapist and Functional Medicine Practitioner specialising in brain health and mental health. Through her clinic, Re:Health, she works at the intersection of nutritional science, metabolic psychiatry, and functional medicine, supporting people who have often exhausted conventional routes without finding answers. Her clinical training includes a Fellowship in Integrative Psychiatry with Dr James Greenblatt, the Bredesen Protocol for cognitive decline, ketogenic and metabolic approaches to mental health with Dr Georgia Ede, advanced functional neurology through the Kharrazian Institute, and CIRS certification using the Shoemaker Protocol. Alongside her clinical work, she delivers keynotes and workshops for organisations navigating rising levels of burnout, poor mental health, and reduced cognitive performance, translating complex neuroscience into practical guidance for teams. In this talk, she draws on her clinical experience and the emerging science of metabolic psychiatry to ask whether the mental health crisis demands not only more awareness, but an entirely different question.