Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century

Date: 17 February 2026
Time: 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: Sociology Seminar Room

This talk begins from a simple, unsettling observation: the stranger is no longer an exception in our political world, but its organising principle. 

In Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century, Ece Temelkuran argues that we are living inside a political and moral universe in which the superfluousness of human beings is not accidental, but systematically produced and sustained.

Across borders, regimes, and ideologies, modern nation-states have learned to govern through estrangement. Home has been transformed from a shared moral horizon into a conditional privilege; what was once described as crisis has quietly hardened into structure. 

This talk explores how societies learn to live with the gradual disappearance of the human as a moral category. What happens when entire populations are administratively present yet politically invisible? When the language of nation replaces the language of responsibility? When fear becomes the most reliable civic bond, shaping institutions, laws, and everyday life?

Rather than asking how to fix the nation, Nation of Strangers asks a more difficult question: how might we rebuild home after it has been ethically emptied? 
 

Speaker biography:

Ece Temelkuran – Canongate Books

Access note: Historic building. The seminar room is accessed via two flights of steps/a lift and then a further two flights of stairs accessed through a heavy set of doors. There is no step-free access. The lift is not accessible to wheelchair users, but may assist with other mobility issues.