Week 5 - Sunny Tran

“Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics”, Michael Peter Smith

www.dreamstime.com

Smith attempts to dismantle the binary in grassroots politics of acting and thinking locally versus globally. The distance created between the imagined local and global leads many to believe that they are limited to only those two options: thinking and acting on a local scale, or thinking and acting on a global scale. Smith suggest three alternate ways for grassroots politics to organize, all of which use transnationalism to skew the global-local nexus. The new political spaces created by transnationalism in the new globalized world, such as refugee, immigrants, and workers, must be fought for and represented in local, multi local, global, and local-global spheres. Connecting this perspective to the increasing encroachment of corporate entities on workers rights and the peoples' welfare, how can we organize politically for effective disruption and change?