Week 5 - Douglas Tran - ASA 114

I felt that this week’s reading had common themes with this week’s topics in my communication class. In my communication class, we talked about the difference between an ego network and a global network. An ego network is the web of social relationships that stems from an individual whereas a global network is how social relationships connect everybody. In the article, Smith talks about how the migration of different populations has created this global network. I think this idea of a global network has close ties with transnationalism and the growth of globalization.  As certain populations of people continue to exist in two different places at once, they are able to network with an exponentially greater amount of people thus expanding their global network. Another idea from the reading that stood out to me is the slogan “Think Globally/Act Locally” and “Thinking Locally and Acting Globally.” In my opinion, this slogan embodies the idea of grassroots politics. With grassroots movements, they typically have no backing from high profile organizations or investors. They are started by students/people who want to make some kind of change.  When a movement “thinks globally and acts locally,” that reminds me of the Hong Kong protest at UC Davis. This organization of people aims to project a message about an issue overseas to their own small (in relation) group of students. Transversely, when an organization “thinks locally and acts globally,” they take their immediate population to work on a project that reaches further than our own nation’s borders. For example, I think of Engineers without borders, each branch works with its local organization with the aims of going across seas to help a developing country. Is delocalization and the loss of borders and territory necessarily a bad thing? I realize that people need to have their sense of community but is the gradual expansion of transnationalism going to lead to worldly acceptance of different cultures as different diasporas create different hybrid cultures? 



Works Mentioned

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

https://www.sampsoniaway.org/sw-daily/2017/07/07/cartoon-fading-borders/