Saskia Sassen: Expulsions

Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

Public lecture hosted by LSE Cities

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice.

The language of “more” – more inequality, more poverty, more imprisonment, more environmental destruction is insufficient to mark the proliferation of extreme versions of familiar conditions we are seeing worldwide. In her new book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Saskia Sassen develops concepts that seek to capture these extreme conditions.

In this LSE Cities public lecture, Sassen shared reflections from Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. The book explores how today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations can be understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.

 

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    Saskia Sassen

    Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and co-chairs its Committee on Global Thought. Her research and writing focuses on, immigration, global cities, the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. Her most recent book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014). She has received multiple honours, most recently the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize for the Social Sciences.

    Ash Amin

    Ash Amin FBA, CBE, 1931 Professor of Geography and Head of Department, University of Cambridge. Professor Amin is known for his work on race and multiculture, cities, and affective politics. His most recent books include Land of Strangers (Polity, 2012), Arts of the Political (with Nigel Thrift, Duke, 2013), Releasing the Commons (ed. with Philip Howell, Routledge, 2016) and Seeing Like a City (with Nigel Thrift, Polity, 2016). He is a Fellow and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Italian Academia Nazionale Dei Lincei.

    Ricky Burdett

    Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE), and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age project. He is a member of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board, and was chief advisor on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and architectural advisor to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006. He was director of the International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2006. With Deyan Sudjic he is co-editor of The Endless City (2007) and Living in the Endless City (2011) and, with Philipp Rode Shaping Cities in an Urban Age (2018).