She could relate a unique history of having engaged with and advised such earlier key figures of the left as Ken Livingstone in the s and Tony Benn in the s. But she was by no means a mere counsellor to Great Men of the Left. She was a lifelong feminist and was absolutely at the forefront of the radicalisation of human geography from the s onwards: a pioneer both in developing approaches informed by Marxism and then in complicating those approaches with a detailed attention to the multi-dimensional nature of power, space and selfhood.
It was a privilege for us to have worked with her as an author, and we will miss her. Opening Propositions. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Doreen Massey Doreen Massey, the geographer of space and power, died on March 11 at age For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click here.
Professor Massey is a geographer who wants us to rethink many of our assumptions about space, including the assumption that it is simply something we pass through. She believes that an analysis of spatial relations between, for example, people, cities, jobs, is key to an understanding of politics and power.
Doreen Massey: Hello. Thank you. Nigel Warburton: The topic we are going to focus on is space. Doreen Massey: I think the immediate way to respond is that if history is about time, geography is about space. Doreen Massey: Right, well one of the things in the sense was anger: I got really annoyed with the rest of the social sciences, and indeed with philosophers, paying so much attention to time.
So I want to see space as a cut through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any one moment. Space and time become intimately connected. Well, at this moment it is already night in the Far East, my friends in Latin America are probably just stirring and thinking about getting up, and space is that cut across all of those dimensions. Now what that means is that space is the dimension that presents us with the existence of the other; space is the dimension of multiplicity.
It presents me with the existence of those friends in Latin America and that means it is space that presents us with the question of the social.
And it presents us with the most fundamental of political of questions which is how are we going to live together. Doreen Massey: Exactly. Whereas space is material: it is the land out there. Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.
So globalization, for instance, is a new geography constructed out of the relations we have with each other across the globe. And the most important thing that that raises if we are really thinking socially, is that all those relations are going to be filled with power.
So what we have is a geography which is in a sense is the geography of power. The distribution of those relations mirrors the power relations within the society we have. Nigel Warburton: Could you give an example of that? The power relations that run out from here around the world from that square mile and Canary Warf are extraordinary.
London is a key node, if you like, within the globalisation that has taken place over the last thirty years, the financial globalisation — the dominance of finance within the organisation of the global economy.
And London has been absolutely at the centre of that, not just that some of the most powerful institutions are there, and they are, but also in the sense that it was there that a lot of this neo-liberal economics within which we now which live was imagined in the first place.
And London has been part of the export, the imagination in the first place and then the export, of that way of thinking around the world. I mean, one thing is that it enables you, if you like, to map power relations.
What I do find that we should be critical of in the social sciences is the unequal distribution of power: power of some groups over others, power of some places over others. And so one might want to be critical and indeed I am very critical of the role of the city of London in its domination of economies and economic ideologies, if you like, around the rest of the world. Discussions in the early 80s with her friends Stuart Hall , Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau informed the inventive political analysis associated with Marxism Today.
In she co-founded the journal Soundings with Hall and Michael Rustin to develop this open left intellectual position. Born in Wythenshawe, Manchester , Doreen was the daughter of Nancy and Jack, who were immensely proud of her achievements. They had both left school in their early teens and were keen that Doreen and their other daughter, Hilary, should have greater educational opportunities.
Jack worked as the groundsman at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club, known as the Wimbledon of the North for the excellence of its grass courts. They both continued their own education through night school. At CES she and Alejandrina Catalano wrote Capital and Land , a study of capitalist forms of land ownership in Britain, and she collaborated with Richard Meegan on studies of industrial reorganisation and unemployment.
She was also fiercely committed to the Open University, which in appointed her professor of geography. She remained there until and beyond her formal retirement in Her work with her friend and colleague John Allen on thinking through the relations between the social and the spatial made OU geography intellectually vital. Through co-editing Geography Matters and developing popular courses such as The Shape of the World and Understanding Cities, Massey had an influence on teaching and scholarship beyond the OU.
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