Making, Opening, Reconceptualising Space
Posted on 09/08/2022
To celebrate the e-book publication of Doreen Massey: Selected Political writings, four writers give their perspectives on Massey’s influence and legacy.
Marion Werner
Doreen Massey changed geography. A committed socialist and feminist, her contributions insisted upon the significance of political economy while remaining steadfast in their refusal of economic determinism. Massey modeled ways of doing political economy from the ground up, be that the Kilburn High Street or a Caracas neighborhood council. She trained her immense intellect on the structural dimensions of uneven development while demonstrating that those forces simply “do not arrive raw at the factory gate,” as she put it in Spatial Divisions of Labour (SDL). Regions are not inherited units slotted into pre-existing core and periphery positions. Instead, regions are made and remade – along with their relative positionalities — through processes that cannot be reduced to capitalism alone. Massey’s work helped me to conceptualize this relational understanding of uneven development from the perspective of the globalized apparel industry and its feminized workforce in the Caribbean. My approach was to analyze a geography “not of jobs,” as Massey wrote in SDL, “but of power relations,” where workers’ aspirations along with regional trajectories of change were consequential to the contours of this industry and what followed in places after the industry moved elsewhere. I have continued to work in the Masseyian tradition in geography, which builds upon at least three principal contributions from her legacy related to and beyond her work on uneven development: first, a continual engagement with articulations of social difference, capital accumulation and politics; second, a focus on political conjunctures and place-based progressive solidarities that can be forged in such moments; and, finally, a sharp class and gender critique of academia itself.
Marion Werner is author of Global Displacements: The making of uneven development in the Caribbean (Wiley, 2016), and co-editor of The Doreen Massey Reader and Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues (Agenda, 2018).
Brigid Lynch
Doreen Massey has had a profound impact on my research on Latin America since I first encountered her work over a decade ago. As she tells us in her seminal 1991 essay, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, we are more deeply connected to Latin America than we might think, through the densely woven interconnections of space and place that underpin the workings of our everyday lives. What’s more, her strident exhortation to learn from Latin America has consistently informed my work, not least during my PhD on the cultural legacy of the 2001 Argentinazo, a series of popular protests in Argentina that destabilized and then renegotiated established modes of citizenship and political participation, ten years before the Occupy movements in London and New York. In a 2012 essay, Massey wrote about the radical positivity and innovation of the new imaginaries of citizenship and belonging that several nations from the so-called ‘pink tide’ in Latin America sought to generate through the practice of democracy. Her assertion here, that ‘debates about Britishness and Englishness could learn from this’ still holds true. Following the 2019 estallido social in Chile, the formation of a new constitutional convention grounded in the principles of equality and plurinationality, once again offers hope to progressive movements beyond Latin America, and a practical example of the importance of a continual rethinking of hegemonic concepts of national identity. In the current politically moribund environs of an increasingly fractured UK, Doreen Massey’s commitment to the need to learn from Latin America and the intellectual clarity of her writing here is more urgent than ever.
Brigid Lynch is a researcher in Latin American Cultural Studies and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London. Her first book Horizontalism and Historicity in Argentina: Culture Dialogues of the Post-Crisis Era was published by Legenda in 2021. Her research interests include contemporary visual culture in the Southern Cone of Latin America, and solidarity work between Scotland and Latin America during the Cold War. Her current research project, ‘Everyday Wonderlands: Theme Parks in Argentina and Beyond’ examines the history of state-funded themed and immersive leisure spaces in Argentina from 1951 to 2013.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Doreen Massey’s work is not just words. Her texts, however important they might be across disciplines and practices, are not just intelligent discourse and convincing arguments. Massey’s work ushers in flesh and world, togetherness and empathy, community and horizon. The space she opens for us is a critical, difficult, battling space; but also one full of understanding and even forgiveness. It is a perpetually evolving space, astonishingly prescient even after years of its conception. It has deeply affected the way I understand space, not just in terms of academic research but also personally. The emphasis on the relational, in combination with a heightened political responsibility, is what our current planetary thinking needs. In legal thought and specifically legal geography, Massey’s work has achieved a grand opening towards a normativity beyond law and a globality beyond state sovereignty. In the context of my own work, Doreen (as an author and as a person) has offered me the most invaluable gift: the gift of inhabiting a space of luminous emplacement and responsibility.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is an academic, artist and fiction author. He is Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster and Director of The Westminster Law and Theory Lab.
Nuria Benach Rovira
Doreen Massey changed my understanding of Geography from the very beginning. As young students, Geography matters! made us feel relevant in the world. Later, it was a more sophisticated conception of space that made the difference: one in which everything and everyone was on the move, where geographical scales were not watertight compartments and where spatial inequalities were injustices that needed political solutions.
Massey’s conceptualization on space remains one of the best structured and most useful contributions on the subject. Her commitment against inequalities and injustices was sharply expressed in fine concepts such as “power geometries” or “geographies of responsibility”. And as a public intellectual she fiercely denounced the ideology of neoliberalism that naturalizes a violent and unfair market system.
I was fortunate to know her well, both in London and Barcelona, while preparing with Abel Albet a book on her intellectual trajectory (Doreen Masssey: Un sentido global del lugar, 2012. Barcelona: Icaria). Her respect, passion, and commitment were inspirational.
Looking back, I think that Doreen showed me how to be a better geographer, but also how to be a better academic. She was combative but constructive and generous, and I always admired her precise and clear writing. She hated competitive academic behaviour as much as unnecessarily convoluted writing. As Abel Albet and I wrote in our book chapter ‘Doreen Matters: ways of understanding and being in the world‘, Doreen taught us a way of understanding the world that was inseparable from her way of being in it.
Nuria Benach Rovira is a professor in the Department of Geography, Universitat de Barcelona. She is Interested in critical spatial thinking, urban social geography and radical maps. Her main present research deals with the socio-spatial effects of neoliberalism in cities, with a focus on urban peripheries and extreme spaces defined as those characterized by poverty and territorial stigma, but also by the creation of socio-spatial practices of survival. She is the co-director of the book series “Espacios críticos” (Icaria editorial) and director of the journal Scripta Nova. Revista Internacional de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales.
Doreen Massey (3 January 1944 – 11 March 2016) was a geographer, theorist and political activist. She was widely renowned for her work on globalisation, cities and reconceptualisation of place. Doreen Massey: Selected Political Writings is part of LW’s Selected Political Writings series.