Join us for an engaging conversation with remarkable minds on Wednesday, April 9th. This event is free and open to the DePaul community, and can be attended in person or via Zoom.

RSVP HERE

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‘Encountering the Stranger: A Conversation’ is part of a larger project interdisciplinary project that studies the theoretical limits and possibilities of the socio-political incorporation of strangers entitled Encountering the Stranger: An investigation of ideas of collective life. This conversation begins with the recognition that any study of society, governance, and diplomacy requires consideration of visions of collective life. What impact can our study of encounters with strangers have on studies of diplomacy? What historically grounded humanistic narratives and practices do we bring to our engagement with others?

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Shiera el-Malik is an associate professor in the Department of International Studies and an Endowed Professor of The Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University in Chicago. Her research is guided by an interest in the intersection of politics of knowledge and lived experience. Her work is published in the Review of International Studies, Globalizations, African Identities, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Irish Studies of International Affairs, Critical Studies on Security, African and Black Diaspora, Contexto and the Journal of Narrative Politics, along with other edited volumes. She co-edited Politics of African Anticolonial Archive and the forthcoming Teaching With Tomas Sankara.

Siba Grovogui is a professor of international relations theory and law at Cornell University. His work reflects on African contributions to global debates on the nature of politics in the national and global orders. He examines African reflections on the purpose of ethical life and moral existence associated with its past and present, with modernity and its political, moral, and material economies. His many publications include the books Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions, Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law, and the forthcoming monograph The Gaze of Copernicus.

Sam Okoth Opondo is Associate Professor in Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College N.Y. He has written journal articles and book chapters on the often-overlooked amateur diplomacies of everyday life, humanitarianism, biopolitics, the ethics and aesthetics of co-habitation postcolonial cities, the politics of genre and cultural translation in Africa. He is the author of Diplomatic Para-citations: Genre, Foreign Bodies, and the Ethics of Co-habitation (Rowman & Littlefield 2022) and The Books of Judas and Other Stories; co-author of Passages: On Geo-analysis and the Aesthetics of Precarity (with Michael J. Shapiro), and co-editor (with Michael J. Shapiro) of The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis After the Aesthetic Turn.

Nasema Zeerak is a doctoral candidate in International Policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow. She holds an MSc. in Conflict Management and Resolution from Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and a Master of Public Administration from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Her research, focuses on anti/decolonial modes of being and knowing. Her publications include a chapter for the Handbook on Modern Afghanistan entitled ‘Afghan Subjectivities and U.S. Foreign Policy: Postcolonial Perspectives’ a co-authored article ‘What the US exit from Kabul tells us about the value of Afghan lives,’ and a book chapter in the co-edited volume, Women Waging War that is forthcoming with Yale University Press, ‘What else might knowledge and knowledge making be and become?’