Chapter 6 - Why Did Space Matter to Doreen Massey?

Summary

The great significance of space to Doreen Massey – it is one of the main themes of her lifetime’s work – reflects its relevance to the entire society in which she lived and worked. She was one of the most influential and most respected geographers of her generation, and is one of the most-cited scholars in contemporary geography. The themes she explored in her work had resonance for a large number of people in her academic field, in political life and more widely. This chapter will ask how one can explain the significance of the idea of space for her and those whom she influenced.

EXPERIENCES OF MOBILITY

One should first recognize that Doreen Massey’s life itself involved some abrupt and challenging relocations in space. First the transition from the Wythenshawe housing estate where she grew up, to one of Manchester’s leading state girls’ schools, and then to the upper-middle-class environment of Oxford University, at the “women’s college” St Hugh’s, which admitted its first male students in 1986 many years after Massey’s time there (see McDowell, this volume). Many writers have reflected on the transition from a working-class upbringing to the milieu of a university, and Oxford and Cambridge universities in particular, as a massively disorienting and alienating one, although for many it was also an enabling one. Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Richard Sennett each wrote about the effects and meanings of cultural relocations like this.

Writers, including several with values similar to Doreen Massey’s, have deployed different intellectual resources to reflect on such transitions. For Raymond Williams, born in 1921 near Abergavenny in Wales, the initial resource was his training in literature and literary criticism. His own working-class origin was a key point of reference for him in his major work on the English novel and on drama (Williams 1968, 1970). He reinterpreted the “Great Tradition” of the novel which he encountered in the Cambridge English curriculum, through the perspective of class relations.