Chapter 1 - Out of Place: Doreen Massey, Radical Geographer

Summary

Doreen Massey changed geography. As a creative scholar, an inspiring teacher and a restless activist, she initiated new ways of seeing, understanding and indeed changing the world. She launched critiques, both in the relatively small world of economic geography and the much bigger worlds of social theory and progressive politics, which would prove to be truly transformative; she developed arguments against a host of establishment and orthodox positions that left something better and more productive in their place; she confronted structurally embedded power relations, most notably of class and gender, while steadfastly resisting political and analytical foreclosure; and she started conversations that continue to resonate and reverberate, not least those around the protean potential of place, even in these challenging times.

“There is no point of departure” is a line that Massey liked to quote from Louis Althusser (1971: 85; Massey 1995b: 351; Featherstone & Painter 2013). For her, it meant that socially made historical geographies really matter, always and everywhere, and that futures are neither singular nor pre-given. Her own life was a case in point. The product of an “ordinary place” (Massey 2001b: 459), a public-housing estate just south of Manchester, Doreen Massey knew where she came from and for that matter, which side she was on. “I’m from the North West [of England] and have lived with, through and kind of in combat with regional inequality [since] my childhood”, Massey once explained (Massey with HGRG 2009: 405). Out of the conformity of postwar Britain, Massey fashioned a transformative trajectory not least, she later reflected, by participating in political movements “in the late 60s and the 70s with the emergence of Marxism, feminism, sexual liberation, being part of the GLC [Greater London Council] in the 1980s, or the kind of stuff that has happened more recently”, from Chavismo in Venezuela to the Occupy movement in London (ibid.: 403, 405; Featherstone et al. 2013: 253, 257).

From her adopted home of Kilburn, in North London, she would sometimes commute to work at the Open University with her longtime friend and collaborator, Stuart Hall.