in conversation with Quinsy Gario

We are very pleased to welcome Saskia Sassen (live from New York) for the keynote of Sous les pavés, het strand. 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. An ethics of the city is perhaps inevitably a bit of an ugly-duckling ethics, an imperfect ethics. The working thesis is that it is an ethics where social justice, rather than a purer and more elevated notion of ethics, becomes as strong as all the forces aligned against it. Cities are sites of inequality and indifference: therein resides the challenge.

• Saskia Sassen is a Dutch-American sociologist and economist, known for her research on globalisation and international migration, and for coining the term 'global city'. She is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York. 

• Quinsy Gario – a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten – will lead the discussion. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario's most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012). As a member of the collective Family Connection established in 2005 by his mother Glenda Martinus and his aunt Gala Martinus, his current research is about attempting to institute otherwise.