POL 2140A Notes
Week 1- First video
 Tiktok video the actual reason behind the US-China trade war is because of
inequalities and problematic wealth distribution. Comparative advantage, China has
competitive advantage over the US in manufacturing, due to cheap labor, US has
comparative advantage over China in financial services
 Benefits of Trade Both US and China reap benefits from trade, but China has a more
equitable system so more people (bottom, middle and upper class) benefit more than
the US which has a less equitable system
 Bottom 50% of people in the US has seen no real growth from trade from 1978-2015
2nd Video
 In 2020, world merchandise trade decreased by 7.4%
 Strong recovery of 22.4%
 Developing economies imports in 2020 followed the global trend and fell by 8%
 Trade imbalance between developing and developed world went up for the 4 th
consecutive year
 Tariffs low in Canada and US (0.8% and 1.6%). Higher tariffs to punish countries with
high tariffs
 North pole isn’t stationary, it moves around
3rd Video
 Thinking about Globalization and global conflict (what makes things global?)
 Social, cultural, economic, political (not politics)
 What is globalization? (Time: beginning, middle and end?)
 What isn’t globalization? (Not much= many different things we can do)
4th Video
 Global maps the weird two-dimensional construction of the globe
 Every single map is distorted in some way
 Mercator map fails in representation of size
 Maps are different ways to think abt globalization
5th Video
 There’s no right map projection
 Different ways to frame the world:
 Moscow the center of Bulgarian maps
 America is in the middle because Americans surprised that Japan could attack them
 China in the center of the Chinese maps
 Distortions of Greenland, Africa
Week 2
1st Video
 Airports Represent paradox of mobility and immobility
 E.g. nodes of the network impossible to avoid
 Can’t get direct flights from London Ontario to almost anywhere
 Are they characterized by their staticness or their mobility?
 As a commercial space constantly temporary because:
 Moving out barriers, changing shops, upgrading- buildings learn and adapt
 Consumer goods to reinforce mobility
 Mobility at airports is linked to hierarchy
 NEXUS= speed
 Racism constructs threat
 TSA as theater
 Post-covid airport chaos
2nd Video
 Globalization: Planetary process(es) involving increasing liquidity and growing
multidirectional flows, as well as the structures they encounter and create.
 Transnationalism: Processes that interconnect individuals and social groups across
specific geopolitical borders.
 Transnationality: The rise of new communities and formation of new social identities
and relations that cannot be defined as nation-states.
 e.g. World cup (global) v. World Series (transnational)
 If talking about something that’s global use metaphors to help
 ‘Wall” is a metaphor for securing the border
 Broad metaphors to help us understand issues
 Metaphor one: Solidity
 People, things info, places (metaphorically) tended to be hard or were hardened
 People didn’t go far from where they were raised (Kant)
 Tools, food, newspapers, books mainly local
 A world in which barriers exist to prevent the free movement of all sorts of things e.g.
Great Wall of China, Berlin, Israel/Palestine fence
 Quebec language laws
 Solidity- ‘people, things, info and places “harden” over time and therefore have limited
mobility.
Week 7
1st Video (Intro)
 Learning Points: Culture and Difference: Identity, self and otherness; how we deal with
difference and strangeness
 Degrees of difference related to globalization: global commodities (one direction)
versus extreme difference (Korean comfort women)
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Cultural differentialism: ‘cultures remain stubbornly different from one another’, core
parts remain unaffected; globalization as mosaic versus billiard balls
Lecture Notes- Global Culture and Cultural Flows
 Flow of culture is easy because culture exists increasingly in digitized forms
 There are still barriers to digital culture e.g. lack of access to internet, particularly in the
south.
 Not all cultures flow with the same ease/ at the same rate- cultures of world’s most
powerful societies flow much more easily than weaker and more marginalized societies
 Three theories of globalization: Cultural differentialism, cultural hybridization, cultural
convergence
 Differentialism: focus is on barriers that prevents flows that would serve to make
cultures more alike. Cultures tend to remain different from one another.
 Convergence: Barriers are much weaker and global flows are much stronger; cultures
have many of the same flows and tend to grow more alike.
 Convergence: Local cultures can be overwhelmed by other, more powerful cultures or
even a globally homogeneous culture
 Hybridization: external flows interact with internal flows in order to produce a unique
culture hybrid that combines elements of the two.
Cultural Differentialism
 At its core, culture is largely unaffected by globalization or any processes and flows
 A billiard ball table with the different colored balls representing different cultures
 Two sets of event that gave rise to this perspective: 9/11 and ongoing conflicts between
immigrants and Western populations (seen as clash between Islamic and western
cultures). 2nd event is increasing multiculturalism between the US and Western
European countries
 Samuel Huntington supports c.d theory
 He differentiates among 8/9 world civilizations. Civilizations (culture) differ greatly
based on philosophical assumptions, underlying values etc.
 Grand narrative of relationships among civilizations:
 1st phase: Civilizations started off as being widely separated in both time and space with
limited yet intense contact
 2nd phase: The rise of western civilization, the west excelled in organized violence, the
world came closer more than any other time in history to being one world one
civilization-Western civilization.
 3rd phase: multicivilizational system end of the expansion of the west, beginning of
revolt against it
 Wherever muslims and non-muslims live in close proximity to one another, conflict
ensues cuz muslims are violent
 For the west to survive and prosper, the US must do 2 things: 1. Re-affirm itself as a
Western (not multicivilizational nation). 2. Reaffirm and reassert its role as leader of
western civilization around the globe
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Controversy: Huntington’s thesis promotes cultural racism and islamophobia.
Cultural Hybridization
 Mixing of cultures as a result of globalization
 Glocalization: the interpretation of the global and local, resulting in unique outcomes in
different geographical areas (based on Robertson, Friedman)
 The world is growing more pluralistic; individuals and local groups have great power to
adapt, innovate and maneuver within a glocalized world.
 Glocalization sees individuals and local groups as powerful creative agents
 Example of hybridization, heterogenization and glocalization include Ugandan tourists
visiting Amsterdam to watch Moroccan women engage in Thai boxing.
 Creollization: The combination of languages and cultures that were previously
unintelligible to one another.
Muslim Girl Scouts
 Muslim girls participating in the Girl scout American institution (Cultural Hybridization)
Appadurai’s “Landscapes”
 Discusses five global flows: ethnoscopes, technoscopes, financescapes, mediascapes
and ideoscapes.
 These flows also have disjunctures and they both serve to produce unique cultures
around the world and produce cultural hybrids.
 The suffix -scape means the aforementioned flows have an irregular, fluid shape
(consistent with heterogenization)
 Ethnoscapes: The actual movement, as well as fantasies about moving, of mobile
groups and individuals.
 Technoscapes: Fluid, global configurations of tech and the wide range of material that
moves quickly and freely around the globe
 Financescapes: The process by which huge sums of money move through nation states
and around the world
 Mediascapes: The electronic capability to produce and transmit info and images
globally.
 Ideoscapes: flows of images that are political in nature
 Three things about Appadurai’s Landscapes: 1. They can be seen as global processes
that are partly or wholly independent of any nation state. 2. Global flows don’t occur
only through the landscape, but also in and through the disjunctures among them. 3.
Territories are going to be affected differently by the five landscapes and their
disjunctures form differences in culture.
Cultural Convergence
 Globalization tends to lead to increasing sameness throughout the world
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While these perspectives agree with cultural convergence, they don’t argue that this is
all that is happening or that local cultures completely disappear (cultures often survive
in some form or another.
Example: Delivery of home-cooked meals to workers in Mumbai
Cultural Imperialism: One or more cultures are imposing themselves on other ‘smaller’
culture, thereby destroying them
Example of Cultural Imperialism: hand-woven silk sari making in India. They are being
threatened by machine made saris which are produced with tech from Western culture,
and also being produced in China.
Mike Featherstone, critic of global culture: Process of globalization makes us aware of
new levels of diversity and doesn’t produce cultural uniformity.
Tomilinson: Globalization isn’t global (globalization skips some places) and as a result,
cultural uniformity (a global culture) isn’t being formed.
Deterritorialization: The declining significance of the geographic location in which
culture exists; culture isn’t tied to local geography
The concept of deterritorialization is central to Tomilinson’s work.
Tomilinson “global connectivity” is reaching into local culture, with media and
communication tech playing a big role
John Meyer: There is a striking amount of Isomorphism throughout the world
Isomorphism: A series of global models has led to a great uniformity throughout the
world.
These global models have been spread via a wide variety of cultural and associational
processes.
World culture: The spread of global models, leading to global convergence.
McDonaldization (Ritzer based off Weber): the process by which the principles of the
fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate much of the world.
The 5 basic dimensions of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability,
control through subbing tech for people, and the irrationality of rationality
Efficiency: The effort to discover the best possible means to whatever end (e.g. burgers
assembling)
Calculability: Quality over Quantity
Predictability: things are the same from one geographic location to the other
(globalization!). Employees expected to work in a predictable manner.
Control: employees being controlled by tech, now tech will soon replace them
Irrationality of rationality: e.g. efficiency of fast-food places often means irrationality of
long lines. It also entails dehumanization: employees forced to work in these jobs and
customers forced to eat in dehumanizing settings e.g. their cars
The Globalization of Nothing: there is an elective affinity between globalization and
nothing. This means one doesn’t cause the other, but they vary together.
Grobalization: imperialistic ambitions of nation-states, corporations and organizations
and their need to impose themselves on various geographic areas throughout the world.
Grobalization involves subprocesses: Capitalism, Americanization, McDonaldization.
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Those subprocess are also of great significance in the worldwide spread of
nothingness.
 Nothing: Social forms largely devoid of distinctive content
 Something: Largely full social forms; rich in distinctive content
 Something is more likely to be rejected because the content could conflict with other
cultures, it is easier to export empty forms throughout the globe
 E.g. shopping malls, a large, empty structure that is easily replicated around the world
 4 subtypes of nothing: non-places, non-things, non-people, non-services.
 Non-places: Settings largely empty of content e.g. malls
 Non-things: Objects largely devoid of distinctive content e.g. credit cards (there’s little
to distinguish one credit card from billions of others)
 Non-people: employees associated with non-places (e.g. telemarketers cuz they’re
located virtually anywhere in the world and they interact with customers in the same
way with the same script.
 Non-services: Services largely devoid of distinctive content (e.g. ATMs as they all
provide the same service)
 Cricket as Glocalized: Cricket was brought to India by England (it was an aspect of
colonialization). Cricket was also Grobalized by the English.
Overall, Cricket cannot be reduced to glocalization or globalization. All cultural forms involve
elements of all 4.
Lecture Notes II: Negative Global Flows and Processes
 Examples of Negative Globalization: ISIS recruiting militants in far off countries
 Bauman: Our contemporary era is wholly negative globalization
Dangerous Imports
 It’s impossible to know the true nature of products entering a country due to its global
flow.
 Also, products produced locally contain ingredients from many parts of the world
 The greater the use of global ingredients, the greater the difficulty in ensuring that no
contaminants find their way into a finished product; it is also harder to find the source
of contaminants as they could come from different parts of the world
 US imports a lot of food from China, and China has weak food regulations= outcries and
problems
Borderless Diseases
 Syphilis has roots in Europe and was closely associated with French soldiers.
 The pathogens that cause these diseases can flow readily around the globe, and it is
very difficult to erect barriers for them.
 HIV/AIDS can spread through various ways but is most spread through sexual human
contact. Cannot be contracted through casual contact.
 Ebola was first identified in Sudan and Congo
Terrorism
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One of the most debated forms of negative globalization is terrorism.
Terrorism tends to be a label that those who are in power impose on those who are not
(e.g. US labels al-Qaeda a terrorist organization but resists the label itself, even though
they have engaged in similar actions)
Govts are more likely to label organizations as ‘terrorists’ if they have a different
ideology than themselves
Terrorism from above vs Terrorism from below: Both involve violence against nonmilitary targets and citizens, but terrorism from below happens by stateless
organizations (e.g. Al-Qaeda) and Terrorism from above happens from nation states
(e.g. Israel).
ISIS blurs that distinction as it has its own state territory
Week 7 (2nd Video): Clash of Civilizations:
 Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations: The world is configured on basis of cultural
difference
 Civilization Logics:
1500BC to 1500 CE: cultural separation
1500CE to 1945: Western imposition (tech+war+reason) (West takes over)
1945 to 1990: multiple civilizations rise, general decline of the west
 Huntington’s Assumptions (most are false):
Culture is broad and common:
 Western as individualistic and he thought it was universal= arrogance
 East as collectivist, confucan= assertive
 Islam= always fighting with others
Globalization (as a mosaic) threatens Western universalism
 Believes the west must reassert itself
 Multiculturalism is a threat (Canada)?
 Western Racism as solidarity
Week 7 (3rd vid): A Rejoinder on Religion
The Role of Religion
 The Cold War kept religion subsumed: There was a resurgence of faith after the Cold
War
 Islam is popular and expanding
 Tolerant conversion on the rise
 Bush calling the ‘war on terrorism’ a crusade
 Babarism refers to people who reject American views
Week 7 (4th vid): Culture and Jokes
 Any type of culture expression is going to result in backlash
Cultural hybrids:
 Culture isn’t monolithic, it’s complex
Glocalization: Interpretation of the global and he local resulting in unique outcomes in different
areas.
Society vs the individual- what is more important?
 Globalization often means individualism and uniformity (consumerism + brands)
 Glocalization is an effort to incorporate society and uniqueness (culture and
production)
 Hybrid approach attempts to understand the link between the local and the global
Global Racism
 Symptoms of globalization itself and a reaction to flows
 Efforts to mix nationalism + culture = monolithic ‘nation’ to protect
 Is global racism primarily an example of flows or solid (could be both)
Liberal Racism
 Tolerance for ‘others’ so long as they are like you
Product of multiculturalists policies (Canada):
Problems of rights
And assumption of sameness
Intolerance of intolerance (double racism)
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Central premise of the week: the western vision of the world as liberal democratic and
of history hasn’t articulated a good sense of culture in part because a lot of western
culture involves a lot of appropriating other cultures and making them our own
Week 7 (5th vid): Landscapes and McDonaldization
Appadurai’s landscapes (the 5 different kinds of flows):
 Ethnoscapes: people tourists, terrorists, refugees (global flow of people)
 Mediascapes: transmit info (CNN, Zapitistas, facebook)
 Technoscapes: high and low tech (e-mail, oil tankers)
 Financescapes: sums of money
 Ideoscapes: images, visions, ideologies
Not confined to any one nation-state
Culture Convergence
 Increasing sameness throughout the world caused by flows of ‘global culture’
 Also known as Cultural Imperialism
 Creative destruction (the loss of one culture through the development of bigger, more
dominant culture). Examples include bank tellers, phone booths
UN plays a role in managing cultural convergence e.g. UNESCO-Universal Declaration on
Cultural Diversity
 ‘Globalization doesn’t produce uniformity, it makes us aware of new levels of diversity
(the medium is the message)
World Culture
 The idea that globalization produces a new, world culture (isomorphism)
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Global homogeneity (e.g. schooling, medicare, development). The best practices are
shared
INGO’s (e.g. universalism, individualism)
Ritzer- McDonaldization
 Being able to rationalize a certain way of doing things
 Rationalism of the West (Weber)
 Dominance of Standardization: principles of fast food delivery become central to
society (through 5 ways):
Efficiency: Discovering best means to deliver good
Calculability: Quantity over Quality (emphasis on things being as fast as possible e.g.
drive thru)
Predictability: uniform experience globally; consumers and employees go through the
same process
Control: minimize subjective inputs
Irrationality of rationality: dehumanization (eating in car), long-lines (not fast)
 Ritzer is an apologist
McDonalds as Globalization
Examples of this:
 In 1980, only 25% of McDonalds was outside the US vs. 2006 where 233 of 266 opened
overseas
 Tim’s 2711 in Canada vs 336 in the US
This leads to another concept: The Globalization of Nothing
 McDonaldization could just be Grobalization
 Grobalization: The imperialistic ambitions of nation-states and MNCs in the guise of
globaliation
 These commodities are devoid of content = Nothing
 E.g. shopping malls (non-places)
 Chain-store products, credit cards (non-things) (they contain nothing of inherent value
 Telemarketers (non-people)
 ATMs (non-services)
Global Sports
 Global space of nothing: event spaces are built for global sports that don’t happen
often and because of that, after the event they won’t be used
Week 7 (6th vid): Negative global flows
 These are the ways in which problems and crises are globalized
 The more integrated everything is, the harder it is to identify where problems come
from.
Borderless Diseases
 They’ve always been examples of globalization
 Have links to colonialism
 HIV/AIDS linked to global mobility e.g sex tourism
Huma Microsecurity
 Ecological interdependence: Organisms, social structures, systems that binds us
together
 Human immune system shaped by interactions:
People in new areas have an increased risk of new illness
Illnesses can jump from animals to people (monkeys, cattle, sheep, mosquitoes,
rodents)
There are also invasive species (e.g. English sparrows, zebra mussels, ash borer)
US Downplaying Risks
 US pharma companies employ the wide scale use of antibiotics.
 1969- US surgeon general declares infectious diseases had been conquered and the
focus should shift to chronic diseases
 Meanwhile, with the 1995 Clinton Administration…
HIV/AIDS Threat to national security
1/10 of TB cases are no drug resistant
 Diseases can impact the quality of life without killing
 Infectious disease statistics are deliberately manipulated downwards due to national
pride or economics
 There’s little reliable historical data to show whether or not diseases have increased or
decreased in areas of the world- largely based off perception
Policy Responses
 185 countries have programs for monitoring infectious Diseases
 WHO- Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) but the drawback is they
have limited budget, resources and capabilities.
 CDC in the US
 Doctors w/o borders
 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations
Week 7 (7th Vid): Negative Global Flows II
 Crime (can crime be considered global?)
 It’s always crossed over borders (e.g. piratebay)
 Argument that copyright is the new imperialism as it stifels creativity
 War on Drugs (dealt with on the supply side)
 E.g. if you restrict the flow of drugs, all that does is drive up the prices which results in
more people trying to do it.
 Role of Finance in criminality (Lack of oversight and easy to transfer)
Danger of Nation-States
 Gets to decide what is a threat and what isn’t (makes them dangerous)
 Essentially chooses to forego sovereignty (e.g. free trade zones, concentration camps)
 Also asserts sovereignty (e.g. Anti-terrorism legislation where there is executive
authority)
Terrorism
 Globalization facilitates terrorism via communications, tactics, essages, coordination,
weapons, etc.
War (another negative global flows)
 Nature and character of war
 Does globalization make war more or less likely? (e.g. manipulation of media, easier
global reach-drones)
Week 7 (8th Vid): Thrift (Intellectual Property)
 Central debate of globalization
 Three key dynamics of IP (Authority (Do you have authority to assert it?), Privacy (Can
you stop others from accessing it) and Accountability (Can you maintain it?))
 Transgressions are hard to detect (e.g. torrent sites are traditional a civil offense, but
nothing usually happens because it is hard to track)
Inherent tensions that come with Intellectual Property
 Legal systems, laws to enforce the existence of private property
 TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership)-Trump. This was an effort to criminalize intellectual
property at the global level
IP Defence Industry
 Market for enforcement of ‘piracy’ (there’s no foundation for any claim about Piracy
 Three Dynamics
Politics, Social and Technology
1. Assume that access can be restricted
2. Hybrid Institutions- public and private bodies (e.g. FBI warning on VHS tape
3. Dream of anti-pirate tech
NOTE FOR EXAM: When he asks what is that long ass code that starts with 09 F9 11 02… it
represents the dream of ant-pirate tech and how easy it is to defeat it.
Week 8 (2nd Vid): Globalization and Inequality
 Top 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions.
 Top 50% of admissions come from the top 10% of the rich
Global Inequality
Who wins and who loses in globalization?
 Social Class: Social rankings based off economic factors e.g. wealth, occupation and
income
 Capital: Material assets (e.g. factories and machinery) and financial wealth used to
produce a profit.
 Economic Inequality is growing: 5 causes
 Technological progress
Relationship between Globalization and Inequality
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Globalization contributes to inequality
Raised all boats (raised standard of living for all)
Inequality isn’t static everything we do affects it in some way
Week 8 (3rd vid): Traps of Inequality
 Foxconn and Trump – eminent domains to kick out obstinate home owners who didn’t
want to sell
 Proposed 4.5 billion of tax money to give to Foxconn. Should’ve created 13,000 jobs
 However, it never went through
Markers of Inequality
 The Standard economic ones:
PPP
Income
Health (HIV/AIDS)
 Should happiness be the goal of development (84K standard)
 Horizontal Integration as the new standard
Bottom Billion
 Africa makes up 70% of the bottom billion with other countries such as Haiti, Bolivia,
Laos, North Korea and Yemen
4 Traps
 Conflict traps: Civil wars, failed coups, ethnic cleansing, genocide, imperialism (e.g.
Haiti)
 Natural resources traps (Nigeria was used as an example in the textbook): Limiting
economic development because of excessive dependence on abundant natural
resources. These include oil, commodities, selling foodstuffs on global market (Jamaica)
 Landlocked with bad neighbours: can’t transport to the coast (trade). Switzerland has
good neighbours, Uganda does not
 Bad Governance: Zimbabwe- closed borders, political murders, coups
 All these traps mean countries can’t access global markets for trade and development
Week 8 (4th Vid): Globalization and Health Inequality
Health and Healthcare
Smoking
 5 million deaths a year
 Exporting cigarettes, targeting Africa and South Asia as market of growth (e.g. video
about smoking baby)
 Is this a natural consequence of globalization? A form of imperialism?
Week 8 (5th Vid): Inequality and Divides
 Another Divide: The Rural-Urban Split: All liberal democracies disproportionally favor
rural areas in their voting (Japan)
 Farmers feed cities but who feed farmers? (disproportional)
 Farmers being subsidized not to farm anymore
Global Digital divide as another form of inequity
 Lack of access to goods
 Lack of access to internet (starlink- elon musk)
 Lack of access to FREE internet (e.g. great firewall of China)
 E-waste: Illegal shipments, disposable culture
 E-waste is hard to regulate because of what could be hazardous and what could be
recycled or not (e.g. cellphones that could be reused elsewhere, MRI can be repaired
and reused
Even more divides
South-to-South migration
 Happens just as often as South-North migration
Week 8 (6th Vid): Income and Inequality
What is Globalization’s role in Inequity?
 It’s decreasing inequality between countries but increasing inequality within the
country (e.g. other countries can buy McDonalds just like the west can)
Comparative Advantage-Specialization at what the country is good at
Theory: Specialize in areas where most beneficial e.g. China with cheap labor and Jamaica with
carrots
 In practice, when things like flowers, fruit vegetables, coffee are produced…
 They are tied to the supply chain and more susceptible to swings in prices
 The idea of full free trading (economic trading globalization) makes everyone more
vulnerable to swings in trade and currency and make volatility more likely in that
system.
 Volatility within a prescribed range is good if you’re speculating/betting
The Rise of the City
 Cities are more vulnerable to swings that impact how they function
 Sassen: Global cities are the key to globalization
 Sassen: Rise of things that come from cities as people are moving to cities: Fashion,
malls, pop culture, k-pop
 Sassen: Cities are nodes in the network- hubs of relations, organization and social order
(e.g. London)
 Finance, legal technical products with own political economies.
 Hierarchies also develop (languages) and losers (homeless)
How People Live
 Relations of social production (Agriculture vs Global demand)
 Relations of resistance (consumer movements, food safety, worker rights)
Week 8 (7th Vid): Majority vs minority culture
Important Concepts
 Intersectionality
Multiple, overlapping forms of social inequity (e.g. Black women being discriminated
against because they are women and because they are black.)
Consists pf gender + race + ethnic group + sexual orientation + age + social class
 This creates problems for democracy because people aren’t sure of what a democratic
representation of people who can speak for you looks like
Majority vs Minority Groups
 Washington racial slurs (everyone wanted name to change but structures were in place
to let one person say no)
 Essentially superordination and subordination paly a role in creating majority and
minority groups. Give one group power and they will end up abusing the other group
Origins of Majority vs. Minority groups:
 Apartheid South Africa
 North vs. South
 Hutu vs. tutsi
 Whiteness vs. Non-Whiteness
Movement and Ethnicity
 Delineation between those who can move freely (tourists) vs. those in minority
categories that are immobile or forced to move (vagabonds)
 Citizenship as an untaxed form of wealth
 Minority groups are often the product of colonial/imperial encounters
Week 8 (8th Vid): The Nation State and Ethnicity
 Canada doesn’t have a monoculture
 Nation states try to create an identity with the myth of their monoculture (e.g. US home
of the brave, land of the free)
Race and Ethnicity in Globalization
 Race: defined based on real or presumed physical, biological or phenotypical
characteristics (but if you cross border, times change = it’s different)
 Enlightenment: race= lower classes, members of society that were ‘uncivilized (poor,
women)
 Science was used to support social norms
 Race has no scientific foundation
 Ethnic Group: Social group defined on basis of cultural characteristics
 Globalization has shifted from state control to hegemonic power
Racism
Racism: Belief in the inherent superiority of one racial group and the inferiority of others
It is a question of education (e.g. AI being racist)
Xenophobia: ‘beliefs, attitudes and prejudices that reject, exclude and vilify outsiders’
Ethnic groups and nation-states have never matched up
Colorism (pigmentocracy)
 Darker skinned members of a single racial group are more discriminated against than
those with a lighter skin color. Based in Latin America
Does Globalization promote Racism
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Movement results in categories
Flows lead to the examination of culture and the recognition of the ways in which
culture changes (people don’t like change) = xenophobia
Identities that are a product of globalization- identities wouldn’t exist without the
interconnection
Americanization = Anti-Americanism=Al Qaeda? (Ron Paul)
Ethnic Conflict within Nation States
 Ethnic Conflicts post-cold war is said to have increase
 Identities are consumed
 New category of ethnic cleansing
Week 8 (9th vid): Genocide and the rise of the right
 Ethnic cleansing doesn’t have those categories in international laws because genocide
is a new concept in legal mechanism.
 Lempkin Looking at Armenian genocide (behind the drafting of the international
convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide- adopted by the UN general
Assembly in Paris on Dec 9th 1948)
 Lempkin 1914 Pushed for definition of genocide (because we didn’t have a
mechanism for this-nation state is usually responsible of taking care of its residents)
 Genocide definition: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
 Ethnic cleansing: removing a set of people from an area in order to control it. Could
result in genocide but no necessarily
 Ethnic cleansing in 1991 was unclear
 As a consequence of this, we see a rise of the right
Rise of the Right
 Influx of Latinos in US (12.5% of population)
 European Identity
 Are neoliberal parties more likely to breed racism because they oppose redistribution?
Or does redistribution breed neoliberal parties based on racism
Week 8 (10th vid): Norms, gender and oppression
Gender
 Hierarchies of gender define all social orders- matrilineal societies used men to go to
war, always been fluid and non-binary (amorphous history)
 Tradition is more complicated than ‘common sense’ renders tradition (polygamy,
biological determinism) as choice
 Gender norms as being inherently oppressive.
Intersex as natural
 Biologically consistent (1/2000)
Not the same- there’s no single ‘intersex condition’
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Socially constructed
This was an unremarkable part of human societies but started showing up because
doctors noticed and became concerned
The west loves binaries (example being in France where hemaphrodites are forced into
gender roles to prevent deviant lifestyles
‘Discovery’ of homosexuality by doctors = search for cure. This was Normalization
Normalization
 Consists of early corrective surgeries
 1950’s John Hopkins developed ‘optimal gender rearing model’ (OGR)
 All ambiguous children born gender neutral
 Doctors assigned gender (without knowledge of parent) even if healthy and fertile
 Doctors withheld medical records and deceive parents and patients (prevent confusion
and depression)
Difficulties and resistance
 Think about it as majority (normal niggas) vs minority (intersex niggas)
 There’s no intersex community, but meetings and social spaces
Point of all this?
 Intersex complicates the relationship between physical and social bodies
 Gender is inherently oppressive
 Sexuality doesn’t have a clear relationship with gender
 Normalcy can mask oppression (brought up question of guys wanting to carry full baby
to term)
Week 8 (11th vid): Global care chains
How does gender link back to globalization?
 Gender is embedded in globalization
 Racialized and gendered norms about tiny nimble fingers (woman production chains to
assemble electronics)
 Low-paying, informal, temporary work uses social reproduction to help economic
reproduction: targeting women who worked outside the house as practicing witchcraft
 Export-led growth=EPZ= more southern women in northern production
 Increasing ‘labor-force’ participation
 New development strategies (microcredit) rely on women
Feminization of Labor
 Shift to irregular underpaid work to take advantage of bodies that are already socially
reproducing (Walmart and class action lawsuit for them underpaying women)
 Labor intensive industries informalize production (Benneton- company that had small
workforce, stack up outside houses and let women build up their stuff) rely on gender as
disciplinary mechanism
What does women’s work look like?
 North: Likke men, but different payment (glass ceiling) + social reproduction
(pregnancy)
 South: social reproduction, migration, limited access to resources
The emergence of the Western Household
Sylvia Federici
 Shift from feudal serfdom to small scale production
 Discipling of gender roles and division of labor in the household
 Social discipling through crusades and elimination of paganism
3 lessons of witch hunts
 Gender roles are influenced by history and commerce
 The brutal practices of colonialism were tested on the western populace first
 Actions were the product of scientific and rational theories
Implications
 The feminization of labor is a way to bring in workforces and push out other workforces
by putting the social obligation on women (double triple bind)
 Double triple bind: to fully participate, have a job and socially reproduce
 Social reproduction is work that isn’t valued but it contributes to society
 Economic participation = partially valued
 Women joining the workforce means we have to come to terms with who’s doing the
caregiving and how it is being enumerated
Global care Chain
 This is the rapid aging of the west who refuses to open up its borders and take security
systems and bring in new people and allow them to grow= low birth/ negative
population growth= declining tax revenues
 Pressures for cheap migration
 Global Care Chains:
 These are a series of personal relationships across the world that rely on paid/unpaid
work of caring. They include: housekeeping, sexual services, nannies, brides…
 North has expectation of women for this work, south picks up the slack
Anti-Feminist Sensibilities
Counter movements:
 Still idealize the ‘traditional family’ (1955-1968). Lasted 13 years
 Rise of anti-reproductive health (anti-abortion): Clinics, restrictive access, tranvaginal
ultrasounds
 Framed in terms of life
Week 9 (1st Vid): Intro (stuff to cover)
 Memes effective forms of communication because they compress format (established
format and allow people to play with format and use format to express ideas)
 Western Values and the Internet
 RFID and containers
 Medical tech
 Space tech
 Fintech
 Crypto currency
 Media
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Election Interference
Week 9 (2nd Vid): Tech and globalization
 Search engines are an effort to grab the data that’s out there and reflect them in an
condensed way in relation to a key word
 It’s going to show the majoritarian problem (going to reflect majoritarian society,
majoritarian attitudes, scooping up all the racism, sexism etc.)
 Key problem: The construction of the engine reflects the biases of the engineers that
built it
 Nobles ‘Algorithms of Oppression’ funny (male comedians) vs unfunny (female
comedians) comedians
 Data finds republicans are obsessed with searching for trans porn
 The internet reflects the biases of society and tells the operators of the internet more
about you than you will admit to yourself
 A lot of companies monetize of selling their customer databases to advertising firms
 SEO (search engine optimization has ‘ruined google’ because people try to game the
algorithm to get their stuff on the first page (worth millions of dollars to be on the first
page)
 SEO and Google’s efforts to increase ad revenue has distorted the very purpose of a
search engine
Week 9 (3rd Vid): Western Values and the internet
Against Normalcy
 There’s a transgressive power of anonymity online
 We have to be counter and then we have to be counter-counter culture (trolling)
 No such thing as people on the internet; you’re interacting with the worst or most
extreme version of people that in normal convos face to face, they wouldn’t say these
things because there would be consequences (there’s no consequences on the internet)
 It becomes this weird compulsion to be as radical and extreme as possible to amplify
your voice
 Trolling becomes transgressive (satire is hard to understand)
 Counter culture then becomes the norm, marginal becomes mainstream
 This goes against the basic liberal premise of a reasonable society that can agree on
reasonable things
 Flattening of info- e.g. Kyrie Irving agreeing with the flat earth theory (troll people), ut
people can’t tell whether he’s being satirical or not and so all kid that see this are flat
earther too, people who have also been predisposed to mistrust info as well will also
agree
 Charlie Hebdo in France: intentionally provocative inflammatory tweets under free
speech
4Chan
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The anonymous group, it provided a space of radical anonymity so people could calt he
internet ‘hate machine’ or ‘asshole internet’ because people could post whatever they
wanted and they became racist, sexist…
 Site creates hive mind mentality- no limit of create expression of thoughts, opinions or
beliefs
 Launched in October 3, 2003 by Christopher ‘moot’ Poole.
 Users post anonymously and the site doesn’t retain content (ip address is tracked)
Western norms behind 4Chan
 There’s an ethos of open source info which the internet was built on, linkd to academic
expression of free ideas
 Lulz- deviant humor that comes from trolling (very easy to troll or say whatever because
there’s no consequence)
 Deviant action can also occur e.g. hacks, wikileaks
 Idea of hive mind/anonymous movement (4Chan) allows them to constantly claim
threats and its only stored in the collective mind of all those involved (It’s FLAT)
Arguments about anonymous
 It represents radical Western Liberal Values: it symbolizes freedom, universalism, free
speech
 It reinforces things like patriarchy, racism, homophobia, pedophilia…
Reddit
 Was involved in the run-up to Trump’s election; it was an echo chamber tht excluded
any critical ideas. These can be very powerful
 Fox news, OAN: Don’t present all sides of the story, just hammer on one side of the
story long enough and people without access to other info will just believe
Buzzfeed
 Incentivization of ad-based model of internet that transforms media into being
idiosyncratic and specific as possible.
 Magnifies minority issues into mainstream ones
 Rise of YouTube and alternative media (e.g. Joe Rogan…)
Globalization from above and below gets convoluted on the internet due to the flatness
Cyber Threat Inflation: The inability to attribute specific actions to specific actors online leads
to propensity of making dangers seem larger than they are
Week 9 (4th vid): Technology, Containerization and Globalization
 Technology and its role in globalization
 Transportation tech
 Container ships and terminals
 Monster ships
 Air freight and Fedex
 UPC/RFID
Containers
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Global standardization: allows everyone to build, deal with, have standard length…
20/40 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 and a half or 9 and a half feet tall
20 tons in weight 5 stacked on top of it (TEU is the length of the standard shipping
container)
 These are temperature controlled dry boxes, in which 80% are manufactured in China
and 90% of International nonbook trade travels in containers
 Containers emerged over 50 years ago and was created by Ideal X
 A tanker was converted from Newark to Texas 1956
 During Covid, all the goods form China was getting shipped across was shut down, so
containers weren’t shipping, so prices rose
War and Containerization
 Malcolm McLean- trucking company owner who retrofitted ideal X (Maersk now worth
35B in 2016)
Week 9 (5th Vid): RFID
 Tag that allows the tracking of goods around the world
 Commonality between containerization and RFIDs is there’s n element of the military
and private sector deciding these things.
Barcodes and RFID
 IBM created standard in 1970s
 1 digit code and barcode that started with a pack of gum
 Barcode can distinguish the type of item but not the individual item
 Also has to be handled with line of sight
 RFID provides more info than a barcode
 It can identify any object anywhere automatically via small chip that has embedded
identification code and antenna radio signal at a distance
 Used in western parking system
 Number large enough to identify every object on the planet
Week 9 (6th vid) Health Care Tech
Time and Globalization
 Time Space Compression: The shrinking of space and the reduction of the time required
by a wide range of processes, required by a wide range of processes
 Speed with change is taking plac is rapidly increasing
 Time Space Distanciation: The stretching of social relations across space and time,
brought about by technological change
 Social spaces stretched farther than before
 Medical Tech- CRISPR (Gene splicing tool) altering genetic code of babies (makes a cut in
the dna to edit a specific gene)
Medical Tech
 Expensive tech and Research and Development
 Pharma and profit incentive clashes with public good
 Tech innovations remain in North, limited access to basic tech in South