Are you interested in hiring Saskia Sassen to speak at your event, conference, trade show, meeting, or convention?
As a keynote speaker, she knows how to command a stage where she can deliver a powerful presentation that will captivate your audience.
On this page you can contact Saskia Sassen’s speaker booking agency to learn more about her speaking fees and availability.
A booking agent will respond to you within two business hours to let you know if they are available and how much they cost.
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Saskia Sassen is a highly-sought keynote speaker and expert covering such topics as globalization, economics, business. She is a best-selling author, consultant, media pundit, and thought-leader who has spoken at many conferences around the world where she gives leaders the skills they need to deal with fast, big changes in society, the workplace, and education.
Saskia Sassen is hired to speak at events and conferences where she can give expertise on important global business affairs. She is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired from 2009 till 2015. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work.
Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States.
She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. In each of the four major completed projects that comprise her 30 years of research, Sassen starts with a thesis that posits the unexpected and the counterintuitive in order to cut through established “truths.” These projects engendered four major books. There are also a few smaller books and about 40 academic articles in peer-reviewed journals.
She has received many awards and honors, among them twelve doctor honoris causa, multiple named lectures, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election as a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.
In her book «The Global City» (Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd ed 2001) she defends that the global economy needs very specific territorial insertions, and that this need is at its sharpest with highly globalized and digitized sectors such as finance. This went against established notions at the time that the global economy transcended territory and its associated regulatory umbrellas, and that the most advanced sectors would leave cities. The tightest proposition running through the book is that the global city is shaped/fed by the rise of intermediation functions at scales and in ways that go well beyond prior phases of capitalism.
Saskia Sassen has now started a new project on what an “Ethics of the City” would actually consist of. She posits that it will inevitably be quite different from our much-admired classic texts on ethics, which hover safely above the inequities of daily life in a large city. Cities are sites of inequality and indifference, and therein lies the challenge but also the necessity to understand when do inequality and indifference become profoundly unjust and destructive of people, their efforts, and the city itself. Her first three sites for research will be New York City, London, and Beijing. Support for the research comes from the Kaifeng Foundation (Beijing and Oxford).
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.” Her most recent publications include When Territory exits Existing Frameworks (Harvard University Press, upcoming), Cities in a World Economy (4th ed, Sage 2011), Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and The Global City (2001, 2nd ed). She recently edited Deciphering the Global (Routledge 2007), and Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005).
For UNESCO she has now completed a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries, now published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers). Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages. She has received a doctor honoris causa from each Delft University (Netherlands), DePaul University (USA), and Universite de Poitiers (France), among other honors, and serves on several editorial boards, as well as acting as an advisor to several international bodies.
She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Newsweek International, among others, and contributes regularly to Open Democracy and Huffington Post.
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