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Deborah Piston-Hatlen
Framing the Global
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Last modified: Friday, September 23, 2011

Saskia Sassen is the first visiting scholar for IU's Framing the Global project

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 23, 2011

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Saskia Sassen, an internationally renowned sociologist and global studies scholar, will be the first visiting scholar for the Framing the Global project at Indiana University.

Sassen, the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and also a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, will present a public lecture on Monday (Sept. 26), "Beyond National Versus Global: Emergent Assemblages of Territory, Authority and Rights."

Her talk will begin at 5 p.m. in the Moot Court Room of the IU Maurer School of Law, 211 S. Indiana Ave.

Sassen also will be available from noon to 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday (Sept. 27). She will be participating in the Global Studies Positioning Series, a luncheon discussion series at the IU Center for the Study of Global Change, 201 N. Indiana Ave.

Both events are free and open to the public, but space is limited to the luncheon and reservations are required. For reservations, contact framing@indiana.edu.

Framing the Global is a five-year initiative of IU Press and the IU Center for the Study of Global Change, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project supports scholarly research and publication that features new knowledge, approaches and methods in the field of global research.

Sassen's research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), new technologies and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions.

Her first multi-year project led to The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press, 1988), in which she wrote that foreign investment in less developed countries can actually raise the likelihood of emigration if it goes to labor-intensive sectors and/or devastates the traditional economy. In defending this thesis, she went against established notions that such investment would retain potential emigrants.

She again tackled established notions in a second multi-year project, which led to, among other publications, The Global City (Princeton University Press, 1991; 2nd ed, 2001). In The Global City, she pointed out that the global economy -- far from being placeless -- needs very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is sharpest in the case of highly globalized and digitized sectors, such as finance.

Her third multi-year project led to the award-winning Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006), in which she defended the thesis that today's partial but foundational globalizations, from economic to cultural and subjective, take place largely inside core and thick national environments and institutions. This makes globalization partly invisible, she noted, because it is dressed in the clothes of the national even as it denationalizes what was historically constructed as national.

Sassen is currently working on a new project, When Territory exits Existing Framings, which is under contract with Harvard University Press.