Oressa Gray-Mullen — Group 1

Should the Russia-US conflict be examined with a modernization or globalization lens?

BBC Article <— This was an article I read the other day when I was trying to understand the latest Russia-Ukraine tensions.

Note: Russian media screen capture from this article

I will never forget my two classmates from Russia and Ukraine screaming at each other in ~2015 history class. They were friends and related to each other culturally, but my friend from Russia seemed almost brainwashed as she spoke against the American media and swore that her friends overseas were piping the truth to her.

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Media Reflection:

Russia and world leaders are mobilizing to confront this elusive tension politically, but Russia is fighting with media-based education. Russia’s story depends on misinformation, re-routing the narrative, and misdirection.

Since the Second World War, our government’s political movements have strategically clung to our global influence- both through actions and narratives- as the world changes and becomes globally interdependent. Putin has claimed that the United States uses Ukraine as a tool to control Russia’s influence. Russia utilizes the global network of communication and seemingly tosses aside the ethnocentric but gradually interconnected and economically fruitful vision shared by Modernization and Globalization (Reyes, 2001, p.11).

Reyes (2001) argues that through a globalization lens, the nation-state no longer serves as a unit of development analysis due to global communication scales (p.11). Globalization is a stretching transformation of people’s experience of space and time (Jones, 2010, p.5). The implication of this is an awareness to others beyond the classically know ways of measuring the world. The concept of globalization argues that the main modern elements for development interpretation are the cultural links among nations rather than economic or political ties- and in fact, dictating those ties (Reyes, 2001, p.11). Social relations are becoming stretched, “facilitated by information and communications technology, the global media, and transportation” (Jones, 2010, p.5). Though this has not yet taken on a radical reconfiguration of relationships or deterritorialization (Jones, 2010, p.6) – still exhibiting influence from last century’s relationships out of which the modernization theory was born.

From this conflict, a globalized world does not seem to encompass the current condition or progression of the world- despite technological connections and the culture of communications dictating political conduct. Globalized, free-for-all communications became a tool for Russia. However, the nation-states and national identity and power are very much alive for many- especially at the political level. A classical understanding of modernization is a systematic, lengthy, and revolutionary process that can only be partially felt at the current time due to friction between “traditional” and “modern” values (Reyes, 2001, p.3-4).

Therefore, I think modernization and globalization can both be utilized in this scenario. However, modernization still embodies the development of global relations, where the change is irreversible and yet slow movement toward homogeneousness (p.2) yet preserving assumptions based upon the nation-state (Reyes, 2001, p.7).

More if you’re curious: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56720589

Jones, A. (2010). Thinking About Globalization. In Globalization: Key Thinkers (pp. 1–18). Polity Press.

Reyes, G. (2001). Four Main Theories of Development: Modernization, Dependency, World-System, and Globalization. Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales Y Jurídicas, 4(2), 1016. Nómadas.

The Model Minority Myth

When reading the articles for this module, I started thinking about my own identity as an immigrant, more specifically an Asian immigrant.

My parents immigrated to New York City when I was 6 years old, but they had their own reason. As Kelly (2009) puts it, “It is important to avoid any inclination to collapse or homogenize all migrations and instead to note the specificity of context” (Kelly, 2009, p.31). My parents believed that raising me in the United States would offer better opportunities for my educational and professional future. They gave up their jobs and said goodbye all our family members to pursue a life in Brooklyn. Even though they both held college degrees, they returned to school in a community college to learn English. Due to language barriers, my parents could not find jobs that matched their years of skill and experience. My dad transformed from a manager in a medicine company to an assistant who cleaned medical equipment, and my mom went from a middle school teacher to a paraprofessional. They chased the “American dream”, but we did not experience much upward social mobility. We had to move back to China during the financial crisis of 2008 because of financial troubles.

I chose this article because it addresses a lot of the issues that I have thought about, both in general and through reading the articles in this module. Asian Americans are associated with the “model minority” term, and stereotyped to be hard and intelligent workers. On the surface, this may seem like a positive term, but the stereotype also includes quietly working without protest, or serving non-leadership jobs. Furthermore, this gives a false sense of success. Experiences are diverse across any racial group, and this over-generalization seems to single out one group. Just as the article mentions, there is still a high-income gap among Asian Americans. I agree with the article that not only does the myth mislead people, it also compares and pits different minority groups against each other. The myth views Asians in technical roles, and not as outspoken representatives in business or politics. Just like how English language learning does not necessarily lead to success (Warriner, 2007) discrimination simply cannot be avoided just by working hard and increasing income as the model minority myth suggests.

Works Cited:

Kelly, U. (2009). Migration and education in a multicultural world: Culture, loss, and identity. Springer.

Warriner, D. S. (2007). Language learning and the politics of belonging: Sudanese women refugees becoming and being “American”. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 38(4), 343-359.