Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: according to renowned sociologist Saskia Sassen, today's socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion -- from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible. Please join us for a discussion of these important issues.

Sassen's hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economies for the 20th century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations -- assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm's or an individual's or a government's project.

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She is the author of several books, including Globalization and its Discontents; The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo; Cities in a World Economy; Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages; and Guests and Aliens.