Ahmad’s Uprootings/Regroundings  and Kim’s Adopted Territories both complicate issues of mobility and placement within this era of globalization. According to both Ahmed and Kim, globalization is not just about the connections and mobility of goods, but rather the transmission of people and ideals. However, the hierarchies that enable these processes to occur often times negate the personhood and livelihood of people it is enacting. Mobility is a sign of “progression” and advancement but it is also a sign of privilege. The last couple of weeks have proven that mobility comes at the price of another person or person’s expense, that with privilege comes limitations and restrictions for someone else.  These processes shape how we see ourselves as well as how others see us, constructing identities that allow us to experience opportunities and discrimination depending on our race, age, gender, class, nationality, religion, and so many more. However, what makes Ahmed so unique is the critique in the analysis of mobility on as a binary system that separates mobility and rootedness but rather she complicates the analysis. She and the other scholars of the book combine both analysis of kinship and citizens to say that identity is complicated in the fact that it is constantly being developed because of the movement, but ideals about “home” and rootedness also contributes to identity formation.

This identity formation that incorporate both rootedness and mobility complicates the progressive narrative developed countries try to uphold. Kim presents counterpublic narratives that place Korean adoptees at the cent of the ethnography. Not only is this refreshing, but it is needed. Kim notes that there are many legal rights that protect the rights of adoptee parents, that emphasize the experience of those doing “charitable” work while ignoring or not seeing the value in recording the experiences, feelings, and emotions of the adopted children. Their experiences reflect the global social, economic, and cultural politics of globalization, often times embodying all levels of the complicated nature of transnationalism.

In an essence, transnational adoption is a political concern. It records ideas about humanity, citizenship, privilege, and humanitarian work on bodies that might not racially fit into these national molds. It complicates and reiterates ideas of paternalism, charity, and privilege-all ways the United States and European countries characterize other countries as “developing” or in need of guidance for the social welfare of their residents.

Examining these contradictions and intimacies of the processes that form our identities challenges not only how we see the home, but also what exactly “home” is and how we are always centered around it. It validates feelings of disconnectness that some might feel because of a generalized ideal of “home”, of intimacy, of inclusion. Yet with this home there is “other”, and outside, one that doesn’t belong. And this belonging is not only isolated within the domestic area of familial relations but rather what it represents in the regional, national, and global sense. You can belong to a family that doesn’t look like you but you cannot belong to a system that identifies you as someone different than what you see for yourself.