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Spring at ICFRC: Launching a Bold New Season
Dear Members, Supporters, and Community Partners,
As we begin 2026, the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council is proud to launch our spring program season with renewed energy and urgency. This year opens with the debut of Resisting Global Tyranny, a timely series that explores how people across the world are pushing back against authoritarianism, displacement, and deepening global divides.
Through this series, we bring together scholars, artists, community leaders, and public intellectuals to engage with the most pressing international and local challenges of our time. These conversations are not easy, but they are essential.
Thank you for continuing to support this work. Your engagement makes it possible for ICFRC to provide space for meaningful dialogue, amplify underrepresented voices, and bring global perspectives to our community. With your help, we remain committed to keeping Iowa City connected to the world through informed and thoughtful programming.
We look forward to seeing you this season.
Peter Gerlach
Executive Director
Iowa City Foreign Relations Council
| | ANNOUNCING THE SPRING '26 PROGRAM SERIES | | |
The Iowa City Foreign Relations Council is proud to announce our Spring 2026 program series, Resisting Global Tyranny.
ICFRC invites you to join us for a powerful and timely program series exploring how people across borders resist authoritarianism, challenge structural injustice, and reimagine democracy. The Resisting Global Tyranny series brings together scholars, community leaders, students, and public intellectuals to confront the entangled systems of oppression - political, economic, and social - that shape our world today.
| | WELCOME SPRING '26 INTERN, NHELIA! | | |
Please join ICFRC in welcoming Nhelia Alemo, a rising junior at the University of Iowa studying Political Science with a minor in Political Risk Analysis.
As a Congolese-American immigrant, she is actively engaged in foreign affairs and strives to teach others and herself about pressing issues around the world. Living in North Liberty, Iowa, she has seen her community and other immigrants struggle to navigate life in America. With that, she hopes to make their voices heard through ICFRC. In her free time, Nhelia enjoys debate, reading, listening to music, and trying cultural foods. Her love for knowledge has led her to ICFRC to expand her worldview.
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PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE IOWA CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY AND PRAIRIE LIGHTS BOOKS
Across the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) upends small towns and rural communities by staging dramatic raids and rounding up hundreds of people in a single day. These worksite raids fracture families, devastate local economies, and spread fear and trauma that lingers for years. Yet in the wake of these devastating raids, immigrant communities exhibit resistance, resilience, creativity, and an extraordinary determination to rebuild. To discuss this urgent topic, Bill Lopez will be in conversation with Alejandra Escobar about his new book, Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance.
Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2026
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
IOWA CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY
ALSO STREAMING ONLINE: CLICK HERE FOR STREAMING LINK
Hosted by ICFRC Executive Director Peter Gerlach
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PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH DREAM CITY, BLACK FUTURE FEST, IMMIGRANT WELCOME CENTER OF JOHNSON COUNTY, AND AFRICAN FESTIVAL OF ARTS AND CULTURE
This Dream City community conversation will confront misconceptions and cultural divides, while also fostering solidarity and collaboration, between Africans and African Americans in the Iowa City area. To move from separation to shared purpose through empathy, education, and collective empowerment, Thabiti Willis, Grinnell College professor of African Diaspora Studies, will moderate this important discussion with local panelists Tem Mazahir Salih, Ashley Howard, Sunday Goshit, Vanessa Shannon, and Corte Beal.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AFRICA FUTURE FEST EVENT LINEUP
Beyond Divides in Iowa's City Black Community:
Building Bridges Between Us
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
DREAM CITY
ALSO STREAMING ONLINE: CLICK HERE FOR STREAMING LINK
Hosted by ICFRC Board President Sunday Goshit
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Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev (The Loneliest Planet) came to Moscow in 2021 to make a film about independent journalists being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime — as it turns out, just four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host at TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev brings us into a community of sharp, warm and funny young women speaking truth to power as they face increasing threats. Loktev filmed in Moscow during the first week of the full-scale invasion, as the journalists tried to counter Russian propaganda and report the truth on the war, until all independent media was shut down and they were forced to flee the country.
MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS: PART I - LAST AIR IN MOSCOW
January 10th and 11th @ 10AM
FILMSCENE at The Ped Mall
Tickets on Sale Now
| | FEATURED ICFRC PAST PROGRAM RECORDING | | |
November 4, 2016 with Speaker
Michael Zmolek
| | Seven Myths About Immigration | Immigration flows and their regional impacts are increasingly taking center stage in global politics. With mainstream journalism focusing more on the reaction to immigration than on its causes, the result is that immigrants are widely vilified as (potential) criminals or even 'rapists', or more specifically as people who want to take your jobs. This talk will challenge seven myths fueling the rising tide of hysteria by exploring often-ignored truths about immigration | | COMMUNITY SUPPORTED SINCE 1981 | | | | |
