Home

Calendar

Filter

Search

Fall 2020 Diversity Seminar

Diversity Seminar Series

Ashley Cheyemi McNeill, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies 

“Receiving Strangers: Cosmopolitan Ethics and the Narrative Works of Seiichi Higashide and Barack Obama"

Despite worldwide mandates to quarantine, COVID-19 has forced many people (often marginalized and ethnic minorities) into transitory states, seeking both place and shelter. Yet migrants have negotiated the liminal status of perpetually not belonging long before the novel coronavirus blanketed the globe. This presentation restores a humanitarian perspective to the pandemic by inquiring how humanism and migration intersect and effect how every being—in transit or stasis, global Northerner or Southerner, human or non-human—is in the world and works toward their own individual or collective well-being. The institutional, governmental, and social reactions to the state of migration today ultimately asks: Who has the right to pursue perceived safety, to move into ecologies of well-being? Moreover, when transnational travelers are marked as distinctly national (through race, language, war time fears, global viruses, or international politics) in ways that render them as perpetual strangers, what other methods of belonging can migrants receive and offer? 

Employing the philosophical notion of cosmopolitanism—the worldview that all humans are part of a common communal order—I consider how Others could be received in this current sociopolitical moment, in which all national governments must reckon with being under-prepared, both in terms of humanitarian resources and also empathetic capacity. As I examine these questions of global migration, cosmopolitanism, and how the ties and imprints of the nation are always present and regulatory therein, I refer to two autobiographies that provide a lens for this analysis: Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father (1995) and Seiichi Higashide’s Adios to Tears (1993). Both authors extend existing paradigms and perceptions of migrants to foreground a cosmopolitan ethic of self-knowledge through empathy for difference with Others. Obama and Higashide’s stories are dynamically different, the former based in a self-reflective critique of race and the human condition while the latter offers an outward gaze of geo- and bio-politics; yet both gesture to a broader phenomenon in the world, wherein many disenfranchised peoples uniquely access an empathetic humanism despite their often precarious well-being.  

Obama and Higashide’s narratives provide rich, nuanced accounts of how the Other––the perpetual stranger––can be both recognized and received. The cosmopolitan ethic that Obama and Higashide’s narrative works reflect is relevant, and even imperative, today in ways that has not been realized in the past in part because COVID-19 harkens a revived sense of humanism on a scale unlike any we have previously encountered. Ultimately, this presentation seeks to reveal how the principles of international right that bind all human beings collectively depend on a capacity to recognize and receive the stranger, and how our survival will be measured by our ability to cultivate some sense of shared identity.  

The Center for Diversity and Enrichment (CDE), in collaboration with the Office of Graduate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; the University Libraries; and the Office of the Provost is pleased to announce this semester’s Diversity Seminar. The Diversity Seminar is a series of presentations that provides a safe and supportive space in which scholars may present their research to colleagues and students on campus. As part of its mission to promote student success and enrichment, the CDE seeks to support and promote the scholarship of faculty, staff, and graduate students with historically underrepresented global majority and/or marginalized identities at the University of Iowa. Scholars whose research addresses populations with marginalized identities may also submit proposals. All sessions will held via Zoom.  

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa–sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact in advance at

  • Types