Saskia Sassen’s research and writing focuses on globalization (including
social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities
(including cities and terrorism), the 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.” Her three
major books have each sought to demolish a key established “truth.” Thus
in her first book,
The Mobility of Labor and Capital
(Cambridge University Press
1988), she showed how foreign investment in less developed countries can
actually raise the likelihood of emigration; this went against
established notions that such investment would retain potential
emigrants.
In
her second book
The Global City
(Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd
ed 2002) she showed 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 went against established notions at the time that the
global economy transcended territory and its associated regulatory
umbrellas. In her most recent book,
Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages
(Princeton University Press 2006; 2nd ed. 2008), she shows that the foundational
transformations afoot today take place largely inside core and thick
national environments; this allows her 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
are the result of these foundational transformations inside the state
apparatus. She shows how this foundational transformation hence consists
not only of globalizing dynamics but also of denationalizing dynamics:
we are seeing 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.
In addition to the three works described
above, Saskia Sassen recently published
A Sociology of Globalization
(Norton 2007). She has also just completed a five-year project
for UNESCO on sustainable human settlement, for which she set up a
network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries. The results
of this study are published as one of the volumes of the
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems
(Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers). She recently edited
Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales, and
Subjects (Routledge 2006), a collection of her
doctoral students’ work, and co-edited
Digital
Formations: New Architectures for Global
Order (Princeton University Press 2005). The latter
is based on a multi-year project sponsored by the Social Science
Research Council, through its Information Technology and International
Cooperation Committee, which she chaired. Among other projects, she was
involved with the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture, which for the
first time in its history focused on cities; she wrote a lead essay for
the Catalogue. There are new fully updated editions of two of her older
books,
Cities in a World Economy
(3rd.ed. Sage/Pine Forge 2006), and
The Global City (2nd.ed.
Princeton University Press 2001). Her books have been translated into
sixteen languages.
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