"Women and the New Global Economy" Series
Opens with Renowned Scholar Saskia Sassen

Bryn Mawr's Center for International Studies will celebrate International Women's Day, March 8, with the opening of a new lecture series, "Women and the New Global Economy." The renowned University of Chicago sociologist Saskia Sassen will deliver the inaugural lecture, titled "Strategic Gendering and the Feminizing of Survival," at 7:30 p.m. in Dalton 300.

"Women are emerging as key actors in a variety of cross-border dynamics that lie at the intersection of globalization and immigration," Sassen says. "In order to see this role, which is typically made invisible by mainstream accounts about both processes, we need to understand globalization in its multiple localizations. These localizations of the global, especially when they involve women, immigrants and people of color generally, often do not get coded or understood as having anything to do with the global economy."

Sassen's lecture will focus on three instances that capture some of these dynamics and intersections. "One concerns women as workers in global cities, both immigrant women and women working in globalized economic sectors. The second is the growing presence of women in cross-border illegal trafficking circuits for the sex industry and for labor. The third is the emergence of women as new types of political subjects in a context where globalization and immigration have meant that the national state can no longer presume to represent all its people."

Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chair of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council. Her numerous books have been translated into 16 languages, and her commentaries have been published in media outlets around the world, including, in the last year, The Los Angeles Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Economist, Crain's Chicago Business and Newsweek. She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement, for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in more than 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers).

Sassen's new book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, was published by Princeton University Press last year. Copies of the book will be sold and autographed after her lecture.

Other lectures in the series:

Leela Fernandes, associate professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, will present "Gender and the Politics of Globalization: Reflections on India's New Middle Class" on Wednesday, April 4, at 4:30 p.m. in Thomas 224.

Isabella Bakker, professor of political science at York University, Toronto, will present "The Paradox of 'Sound' Macroeconomics and Gender Inequality" on Thursday, April 12, at 4:30 p.m. in Thomas 224.

Bryn Mawr Professor of Sociology Mary Osirim will present "Enterprising Women: Coping with Economic Crisis and Globalization In Urban Zimbabwe" on Thursday, April 26, at 4:30 p.m. in Dalton 300.

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