Saskia Sassen

She is a very intelligent, entertaining and good-hearted person. Professor Sasses brings to class years of experience and often interjects funny anecdotes to drive home a point. Occasionally, her lectures can ramble a bit. But she always finds herself and returns to the topic. Professor Sassen knows several languages and sometimes uses words in unconventional (i.e. incomprehensible) ways. So carry with you what she jokingly calls "her little booklet" (the text book by her) and what I refer to as "Sassen-English Dictionary." If you're interested in the subject, I recommend this class.

100+ pages per week, both from articles and from her book. The readings are usually complimentary to lecture so if you fall behind, you can catch up without missing out on too much. Also, you can definitely get away with skimming articles and focusing on the ones that interest you. Take home midterm and final. Four days to write twelve pages. I found this to be very intense, but a lot of people in the class found it be much less challenging. Both count for 40% of your grade with participation making up the final 20%.

100+ pages per week, which include "Cities in a World Economy" and numerous other works that were ultimately not too necessary. My recommendation is that you peruse the syllabus and get a sense of what the overlying topics are for each section (whether Global Cities, slums, the environment, technology, urban theory, etc.), pick the topic that you understand most or are most interested in, and pick two corresponding readings for each topic; this will help "immensely" for what I deem the most obnoxious midterm/final assignments I've ever had. Based on the experiences of my my peers and others who have taken the class before me, getting an A is extremely difficult. However, you can't really fail this class either. Just... no comment.

Like the reviewers before me, I'm having trouble deciding whether or not I can recommend this course. The content itself is very interesting; it has really opened my eyes to how the world economy has changed up to the present, and how these changes manifest in socioeconomic processes of various scales, especially cities. This is ultimately what the class is about, even as Professor Sassen would probably describe it as something along the lines of "how changes in the world economy have an urban moment, and how this articulates with the various processes made possible by Globalism." It should be noted that the definitions of the words "articulate" and "moment" as Sassen uses them are not found in any dictionary; they mean something along the lines of "connect" and "manifestation," respectively. Alas, Sassen's English is very impenetrable; she uses archaic words and adds obscure meanings to existing words, or both at the same time. She uses the word "imbrication" (a word that I have never seen before this class), for example, to mean "interconnected." It's really unfortunate that Sassen is hard to understand since she is very friendly and is an absolute genius; her contributions to the discipline of sociology are truly incredible. For example, one of the main pillars of this class is how Global Cities (New York, London, etc.) emerged with the onset of Neoliberalism; this trend ex…

As others have said, 100+ pages per week, most of which you don't need to read; midterm and final are both the same format: 3 4-page papers on general themes of the class, which have to be written in about 4-5 days. Not an easy A, but also not a hard B.

I wish I could recommend this course, but frankly I found it disappointing on many levels. You'd probably expect a course on "global urbanism" to have cities as the central theme, but Sassen's course is really more about the economic, social, and environmental impacts of globalization. Cities are important to the story because they are global financial centers and massive population centers, but I wouldn't say this class is about "urbanism" per se. There were only two lectures on urban theory, which focused on late 19th and early 20th century authors and which oddly came half way through the semester instead of at the beginning (where they belonged). In general I found Sassen's lectures mediocre. She speaks (and writes) in a jargon filled dialect that unnecessarily obscures the course content. She also has a tendency to get carried away with boring, repetitious examples. Sassen changes topics each week and generally does a poor job of tying everything together, so it's often unclear what the main takeaways of the class are supposed to be. The midterm and final are basically an exercise in figuring out what the hell the class is about. As a previous reviewer said, Sassen's failings as a teacher became clear when the TA Natan would lead the class and give incisive, articulate explanations that made you wish he was the teacher. Overall I would say this is not a great way to fulfi…

Take-home midterm and final: write three short essays on various topics covered in class, synthesizing 3-4 of the readings each. This is basically the only point of doing the readings, of which in my opinion there were too many. Most readings were 10-20 pages, but some were short 2-3 page articles while others were 30-40 page academic papers. Sassen's book on cities also summarizes most of the key information in the class.

I went back and forth all semester on the question of whether or not I would recommend this class. It is an interesting subject, but I think Sassen's lectures make it seem more complicated than it really is. She basically has a thesis about how "global" cities function in the modern economy, and most of the class is either explaining that basic idea or illustrating countless anecdotal examples. She tends to ramble and repeat herself in her lectures, which got really, really frustrating by the end of the semester. Some of the readings were helpful and interesting, but others seemed to serve no purpose at all, since they were never discussed in class or section and useless on the two written assignments. Overall I think I learned a little bit from the class, but mostly from some of the readings and from the process of writing about it, rather than from the lectures themselves or the discussions. As for the TA's, I have mixed feelings as well. On the one hand, they made it much easier to understand Sassen's basic points than Sassen did herself. I found myself thinking I would have rather taken a class with Natan on the work of Saskia Sassen than taken this class. On the other hand, Jared, who was my section leader, was not very helpful. He made some questionable statements in section, and dedicated an entire review session to explaining how to write an essay à la middle school. O…

My advice to anybody considering taking this class is to sign up, go to the first two lectures, do the first week of reading and then decide for yourself. I personally loved this class. It's listed as a sociology class, but the material covers economics, international relations, current events, and yes, sociology. Each week Professor Sassen covers a new topic. Fall 2012's topics included global cities and slums, urban violence and modern warfare, urban sustainable development, the theory of cities, inequality and marginality of the poor, migratory and monetary flows, and urban technology. I would say the main point of the class is to explain the various phenomena of globalism (especially inequality and polarization) using neoliberalism as a theory and global cities as examples. If this, or any of the topics listed above interest you, take this class. It's entirely worth it. Sassen's lectures are a little complex, but you get used to her style the more you listen to her. She also has an intimidating habit of asking a rather vague question, calling on people until she gets the answer she had in mind, and laughing when someone is particularly off the mark. She's not being nasty; she just finds it genuinely funny. That said, if you disagree with her about something, she's willing to listen and respond to your opinion. The midterm and exam felt to me like trials by fire. You'll be…