Chapter 5 - Becoming A Geographer: Massey Moments in A Spatial Education

Summary

Reading the “locality debates” in the late 1980s and early 1990s centred on Doreen Massey’s work propelled my transformation from an economist to a geographer – along with my conception of the world more generally. I was utterly compelled by her feminist reformulation of space and place, which came to me at a crucial conjunctural moment: the end of the Cold War; the apartheid regime’s unbanning of the African National Congress and other political parties; and returning to my native South Africa in 1990 after an absence of 19 years. It has profoundly shaped my research since the 1990s, and remains central to my teaching and political engagements.

Going back to re-read some of Doreen’s work for purposes of this chapter has reaffirmed her powerful influence – but it has also made clear to me our different relations to Marxism, and how they have diverged more widely since the mid-late 1990s. Yet reflecting on these differences and divergences itself represents yet another moment in a spatial education – one that has pushed me to think more carefully about changing interconnections of political and analytical commitments in different spatiohistorical conjunctures.

MOMENTS OF CONVERGENCE

Let me start with a brief account of how Massey appeared on my radar through the locality debates. During the height of debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was teaching at MIT where a different though related debate was raging around what the industrial future would look like after the implosion of the Fordist–Keynesian compromise and, what in retrospect, we can see as the neoliberal onslaught. On one side were Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, with their celebratory account of what they called flexible specialization in The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (1984), and their insistence that “industry should abandon its attachment to standardized mass production” and emulate small-scale, innovative forms of modern-day craft production such as those in central and northwestern Italy. Fiercely contesting notions of flexible specialization, Ben Harrison maintained that “contrary to prevailing wisdom, the big firm is not only alive and well but is becoming more flexible and efficient”.