Coming Home to the Global by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Professor of Global Studies and Sociology, USC, Santa Barbara

“Coming Home to the Global” by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology, USC, Santa Barbara.
In an evolutionary sense we are global already; we are planetary beings. This isn’t an abstract idea or a normative plea for global citizenship. It simply follows from human genome analysis. We all share common ancestors. Accelerations of global connectivity of the past century have led to the idea that globalization is a recent trend; many accounts extrapolate recent forms of globalization backwards to serve as yardsticks for when global connectivity began. Yet, connectivity is part of our original collective DNA. Recognizing this is coming home to the global. Connectivity is deep tissue that runs through history, a “matted web” of myriad threads of meandering and intersecting connectivity from our ancestry on up.

Sponsored by Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, International and Global Studies