Profile

Saskia Sassen

• Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology
  Committee on Global Thought
  Columbia University

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. She is also a Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her research and writing focuses on globalization, immigration, global cities, new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. In her research she has focused on the unexpected and the counterintuitive as a way to cut through established "truths." Each of her major publications addresses an established "truth." The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press 1988) shows how foreign investment in less developed countries can actually raise the likelihood of emigration, which conflicted with established notions that such investment would retain potential migrants. The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd ed 2002) shows how the global economy, far from being placeless, has and needs very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is sharpest in the case of highly globalized and electronic sectors such as finance. This approach diverged from the established notions of the global economy as transcendent of territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas. Most recently, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2006), addresses the foundational transformations afoot today occur largely inside core and thick national environments; this allows Sassen to explain that some of the changes inside liberal states, most evident in the USA but also increasingly in other countries, are not distortions or anomalies, but instead result from these foundational transformations inside the state apparatus. She shows how these transformations consist not only of globalizing dynamics, but also of denationalizing dynamics-they lead to the formation of multiple, often highly specialized assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights that were once ensconced in national framings. Today these assemblages traverse global and national settings, thereby denationalizing what was historically constructed as national.

Professor Sassen's website can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/~sjs2/