ABSTRACT
Aihwa Ong grew up in Malaysia and was educated and continues to work in the United States of America. She readily admits that her ‘roots in Asia and Western training create a fruitful tension that interrogates Western observations, understandings, and claims’. Her frequent travels across the Pacific and the Atlantic to conduct research and her constant exposure to situations that are extremely varied have informed her understanding of ‘the global’. For her ‘the global’, as opposed to ‘globalization’, is a contemporary form that problematizes what it means to be human today.
