In this first episode, you will learn who Doreen Massey was and get a sneak peek at her politics. We’ll hear from Massey’s former collaborators, friends and colleagues. And from Massey herself.
For nearly three decades, Massey was a professor at The Open University and “loved every minute of it”. The OU’s aim has been to literally open up access to higher education for a wider variety of people. Our approach with this podcast is similar: you don’t need to come prepared – and you certainly don’t need an academic degree to listen to it.
Knowledge and politics can be produced in a wide variety of places. What intellectual spaces have you encountered or actively created beyond the classroom? Please use this form to share your reflections with us.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: John Allen, Ash Amin, David Featherstone, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Tariq Jazeel, Linda McDowell, Tracey Skelton, Hilary Wainwright
Also Featured: Doreen Massey
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
Special Thanks: The Open University, Michael Chanan
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Doreen Massey’s essays and interviews quoted in this episode:
Selected tributes and obituaries:
In this first episode, you will learn who Doreen Massey was and get a sneak peek at her politics. We’ll hear from Massey’s former collaborators, friends and colleagues. And from Massey herself.
For nearly three decades, Massey was a professor at The Open University and “loved every minute of it”. The OU’s aim has been to literally open up access to higher education for a wider variety of people. Our approach with this podcast is similar: you don’t need to come prepared – and you certainly don’t need an academic degree to listen to it.
Knowledge and politics can be produced in a wide variety of places. What intellectual spaces have you encountered or actively created beyond the classroom? Please use this form to share your reflections with us.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: John Allen, Ash Amin, David Featherstone, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Tariq Jazeel, Linda McDowell, Tracey Skelton, Hilary Wainwright
Also Featured: Doreen Massey
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
Special Thanks: The Open University, Michael Chanan
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Doreen Massey’s essays and interviews quoted in this episode:
Selected tributes and obituaries:
Doreen Massey 0:01
The way we are, and the way places are, is a product of our interrelations with with everywhere else. So, England could not be England without having had that empire. And the way in which it is England is a result of all of those relations. The fact that I have the characteristics I have is a result of the geographies within which I am set. And those geographies, those relations within which am set, are all full of power. (Doreen Massey speaking in the film Secret City, 2012, recording used with permission.)
Agata Lisiak 0:30
Hello and welcome to Spatial Delight, a podcast about the politics of space inspired by the life and work of Doreen Massey. I'm your host, Agata Lisiak, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin. Doreen Massey, whose voice you just heard, was a geographer, public intellectual and a prominent figure in British leftist politics. She died in 2016 at the age of 72. Here's what Massey's friend Hilary Wainwright said in the obituary:
Hilary Wainwright 1:01
Tributes were pouring in through social media. Someone wrote: "now we understand what everyone else felt about David Bowie" - that was one attempt to convey the scale of our loss. Doreen's body could be sometimes frail, but her mind was brilliant and tough. As a character, she was strong, passionate, curious and also imbued with modesty and kindness. She radiated political energy and humanity, sparkling with a cheeky wit.
Agata Lisiak 1:29
Doreen Massey was a household name in the UK and involved in political and scholarly projects across the world. Still, beyond academic circles, her work isn't that well known. We're going to try and change that.
Agata Lisiak 1:44
Over the course of 10 episodes - eight in English, two in Spanish - we'll discuss how we can build on Massey's inspiring work to identify and challenge "the geographies within which we are set," as she herself put it.
Agata Lisiak 1:59
We'll take you to London, Caracas, Berlin, Kochi, Coventry and beyond to examine and expand our geographical imaginations. We'll delve into the unequal workings of globalisation, and discuss where social and environmental justice intersect. We hope to inspire you to think about space and place as full of power and to imagine political alternatives to the current world order.
Agata Lisiak 2:26
As a committed leftist, Doreen Massey was dedicated to popular education. Our approach with this podcast is similar: you don't need to come prepared, and you certainly don't need an academic degree to listen to it. Just hit play, and if you like what you hear, share it with your friends, family and people in your community. Everyone is welcome! In this first episode, you will learn who Doreen Massey was and get a sneak peek of her politics. We'll hear from Massey's former collaborators, friends and colleagues, and from Massey herself.
Agata Lisiak 3:01
Let's start with the basics. Doreen Massey was born into a white working-class family in Manchester in 1944. As a teenager, she received a scholarship to study geography at Oxford University and later went on to do a Master's in regional science at the University of Pennsylvania. For most of her life, she was politically involved locally and internationally: with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Greater London Council, the UK miners' strike, women's rights groups in post-apartheid South Africa, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, the Occupy movement in London, and many more. She travelled extensively, even all the way up to the Arctic, all the while remaining deeply attached to England's North West, where she was from, and London's neighbourhood of Kilburn, her chosen home. These snippets from her life may give us a sense of her historical and geographical contexts, but they don't really tell us who she was, do they? Here's how Massey once defined herself: "I am daughter, sister, friend, lecturer, fan of Liverpool Football Club. I am me because of all the relationships I have." So let's hear how her friends and colleagues remember Massey.
Ash Amin 4:15
I would describe her as political to the core, disarmingly charismatic, always ready to debate, always - you say something, and if it pricks her ears, she wants to pursue that topic. And, of course, a complete path breaker in critical geography.
David Featherstone 4:33
I've never met anybody who was just so intensely geographical, who really thought about everything in a geographical way.
Hilary Wainwright 4:42
She's very attentive and curious about other people. So, she would engage you and talk to you and find out about you. And she's very funny and likes to laugh. And she likes a good time. And she likes to engage and argue and she's a great woman.
Tariq Jazeel 5:01
I would say that she was generous, intellectually generous, but jovial, and, and curious, she made you feel at ease. And she always wanted to know what your opinion was, you know, what was going on with you kind of intellectually. And as a young academic that is both empowering, but also quite intimidating as well. But I think that kind of generosity and warmth always shone through with Doreen. She was very human. She wanted to speak with people connect with people.
Tracey Skelton 5:32
She could communicate with anybody. And she was always interested in what people had to say, and was good at listening. But she always had a superb response to come back to. And that was, you know, one of the great things about her skill. And if you look at where she's worked, and who she will have worked with, and how she would have worked with them, then there's this strong sense of the ways in which she could adapt to all of those different fields. And I think that's about being working class, actually. Because as working class, you know, you're at the bottom already. And so you can only go up. And so each time you meet new people, you're hungry to learn and find things out.
John Allen 6:11
She just can be quite frightening, Doreen. Because she's challenging. But she's not challenging in an ego sense. Doreen didn't have an ego that she had to be right. It was challenging because she really cared for ideas, and she was probably the most rigorous academic I've ever met.
Linda McDowell 6:30
And she also had a very infectious laugh. I suppose people told you that.
Agata Lisiak 6:34
They did! And I remember the laugh myself. I met Doreen Massey only once, after a lecture at Berlin's Humboldt University, back in 2013. Her talk was fantastic, the room completely packed. Massey radiated charisma. She was serious and entertaining at the same time. A perfect dinner companion, I thought. And after her talk, we did end up getting dinner together with a small group of colleagues. I remember everyone wanted to sit right next to her. The academic celebrity vibe was palpable, but only because we were so excited to meet her in person, not because she was acting like a celebrity. Not at all. She was engaged, chatty, and very funny.
Agata Lisiak 7:17
She was also, as I later learned from her friends, a very private person. And I find it important to respect her privacy even after her death. So in this episode, I will rely on the things Massey herself revealed about her life in interviews and essays, plus the anecdotes that her trusted colleagues and friends have shared with me. Massey was, in her own words, "very wary of any kind of stories of origin." But she did often talk about where she was from. We don't have recordings of all the interviews she gave so I'll be reading out some Massey quotes myself. Here's how she recalled her childhood.
Agata Lisiak reading Doreen Massey 7:55
I was born in Manchester. From about the age of four I lived in Wythenshawe, which was, at the time, as it was built, the biggest council estate in the world. And I lived in a bit which was built in the 1930s, when it was really believed that working-class people should have decent housing. And I grew up thinking of public-sector housing as something wonderful. I really regret the passing of securities that that place used to offer. You know, I'm the welfare state generation. And I needed it, because I have quite a lot of problems with my health. I've got fragile bones, so I broke my bones all the time. I needed the health service. So had there not been a welfare state and the hospitals, I would probably not have survived so well. And I had state education. You knew you could always get your bones mended, and you had a house, and there had been the 1945 Education Act, which meant that people like us, for the first time, had a right to decent schooling. And somehow, there were enormous securities about all that. I really feel in a kind of physical, personal way, the need for a welfare state, not just as 'a safety net', but for ordinary people simply to provide a decent life. I experienced that quite directly. A lot of one's politics comes from that kind of thing, it's not invented, you grow with it.
Agata Lisiak 9:16
Growing up in a working-class community laid the political foundations for Doreen Massey. She had a strong, visceral understanding of class politics. Tracey Skelton, who's a Professor of Geography at the National University of Singapore, told me about a dinner conversation she had with Massey back in 1994.
Tracey Skelton 9:34
And it was about things like recognising that we grew up in really quite poor working-class households, that we loved being at school. We both talked about how much reading and looking at maps was important. And then what it was like living on a council estate and what that meant and the sort of stigma to some sense, but a close community in other senses. And, you know, obviously all of that becomes very spatial as well. And then for both of us, we talked about the elation, but also the shock that we had when we found that - we'd taken the Oxford entry exam and, amazingly, we'd got in. Because, you know, the data that we knew about how many women get into universities, and then how many women get into Oxford was quite a trial. And it meant that we just felt particularly very excited, very happy about it. But we both said, but, you know, when we got there, we were in shock, as well, because it was way out of our social class identities. But that meant that not only did we have to work hard at that, but also, I think, we both had this real commitment to show we were going to do ourselves really well. And a long, you know, part of that that discussion that we had was, it was a thing about our long-term commitment to thinking about, well, you know, how can we create social and political change.
Agata Lisiak 11:03
After talking to Tracey, I was reminded that my own politics are also rooted in my biography. I grew up in a small Polish town during the turbulent years of economic transformation. Raised under the state socialism of the 1980s and the neoliberal shock therapy of the 1990s, I was the first in my family to go to college. And I was able to do so because the social safety net, although ruthlessly fractured by the market economy, had not yet been fully dismantled. For a girl from a provincial town plagued by high levels of unemployment, university was a mythical, mysterious institution known from books and films, but not an unattainable one. So, even though the class system and the regional inequalities in Poland differed greatly from those in the UK, my mobility, like Massey's, was social and geographical.
Agata Lisiak 11:57
Doreen Massey's life was powerfully shaped by the fact that she was from the North. For listeners outside the UK, the North-South divide in England may not be immediately clear. After all, Manchester and London are only 200 miles apart. I talked to some Northerners to learn about the cultural and economic differences between these regions. Here's Hilary Wainwright again, a socialist feminist and co-editor of the political magazine Red Pepper. She was Massey's frequent collaborator and friend, they worked particularly closely in the 1980s. Back then, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was waging a war on the British working class to advance the project of neoliberalism.
Hilary Wainwright 12:38
The North was the centre of the Industrial Revolution and industrial production. And that continued really, until, I mean, it was hit by, obviously, the Depression, rebuilt to degree in the post-war settlement, post-war era, and then destroyed again by Mrs. Thatcher. And now, the difference, there's that legacy in that history, and that, that has got a culture. I mean, that did produce a sort of class pride. I mean, a bit male dominated because those industries were mainly male-dominated industries, with the exception of textiles, which gives the North West and Manchester a particular identity, different in various ways from Leeds where I came from. But now, and then, certainly when Doreen and I were involved in the 80s and 90s, it's been transformed through Thatcher and neoliberal economics to a divide between finance and declining manufacturing political economy. So now the South is the rich part and the North is much poorer. But that within those regions, there are class differences in themselves. So there are rich people in the North and a lot of many very poor people, very precarious workers in the South.
Agata Lisiak 14:10
Another Northerner, Professor Linda McDowell, was Doreen Massey's colleague at the Open University in the 1980s.
Linda McDowell 14:17
Doreen and I both grew up in the North West. She was from a working-class family. She, of course, is very interested in the economic geography of the UK, and wrote a great deal, particularly sometimes about the South, about the development of what was called the Golden Triangle: London, Cambridge, Oxford. But she felt very strongly that she was still a Northerner, despite living in London for probably three quarters of her life. We sometimes went to give talks together in Liverpool and Manchester, for example. She didn't lose her Northern accent, I don't think. She spoke differently to me. And she felt very strongly, I was going to say out of place in the South, but, but she didn't because she wrote that wonderful essay about Kilburn, what it meant to be living there and thought about migration and so forth. But never, she never felt quite comfortable with kind of elitist institutions. I mean, she did accept an honorary fellowship back at her old college in Oxford, and she had been an undergraduate in Oxford, but she always liked to kind of puncture the, you know, particular, you know, over the top traditions of Oxford.
Agata Lisiak 15:30
Doreen Massey's dislike of elitism is legendary. Her friends report that she was mortified to find out that she was up for the OBE, the Order of the British Empire. Staying true to her anti-imperialist politics, she refused it. But she did accept many other awards, including one from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
Linda McDowell 15:52
It's a Swedish medal and she was going to be awarded it by the King of Sweden. And she got an invitation to say please come with your husband. And she said: Well, I haven't got a husband. I'll bring somebody else. And she chose me! So off I went as her significant other. And we had a wonderful time choosing a suit for her to wear before she went and then we went to Sweden together, and we went off to the palace. We both said to each other: We are not going to curtsy. But we did! [laughs] It was so kind of overwhelming.
Agata Lisiak 16:23
This odd curtsy aside, Massey stance remained anti-elitist. Despite offers to work at more prestigious institutions, she spent nearly three decades at the Open University...
Doreen Massey 16:34
... and loved every minute of it. In a way, the Open University has been for me the ideal place to teach and to do research because of its social project. And because of the way in which it really encourages us as academics to speak beyond the academy, as well as within. (Doreen Massey speaking at an Open University event, 2009, recording used with permission.)
Agata Lisiak 16:53
The Open University is located in Milton Keynes, about 50 miles north of London. It was founded in 1969 by the Labour government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The aim was to literally open up access to higher education to a wider variety of people. I once had a research fellowship at the OU, as the university is commonly known, but I didn't learn much about the institution back then. To find out more, I reached out to John Allen. He's Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the OU and was Doreen Massey's close collaborator. We met at the British Library in the centre of London. And, as you'll hear, it wasn't as quiet as you'd expect a library to be. John told me about Open University's political pull for engaged academics.
John Allen 17:40
At that time, in the 70s, you could consider the Open University as a social democratic experiment in mass education 'cause, at that time, only three or four percent of 18 year olds ever went to university. Suddenly, you had this idea of mass education at the university level. And it was a Labour government. And it wasn't just opening it up to everyone. It was saying: you can go to this university without any qualifications, without A-levels or any qualifications you'd normally need to arrive at a university. That's what open means. And that, in the very term Open University is not - originally it was, one of the names it was going to be called was University of the Air, because it was over the BBC and TV. But the Open captures that social democratic, egalitarian moment where anyone could come. And it became what was referred to as the university of the second chance. People who had not really developed or taken education seriously when they were at school, had a chance, later on in life, as mature adults, to get a degree. And that was something you felt proud of being part of. And Doreen felt proud of being part of a university that gave people that opportunity. No other university did that in the UK.
Agata Lisiak 19:18
Doreen Massey was strongly committed to the Open University. As she once said in an interview, for her, and I quote, "The point about knowledge is not to spread it in the sense of 'I tell you', but to make available debates and abilities to think. The point of education is to give people the confidence and the awareness to think for themselves. That's partly what the Open University is about. Being able to write about relativity theory for 12-year-olds is the thing we should be aiming at." So, how did it look in practice?
John Allen 19:54
Well, it captures it quite well. We used to have a phrase in response to some colleagues' comments: 'That's telling, not teaching. Telling, not teaching'. You need to teach, not tell. So, the key thing was not to pass information across, as in give students the ideas; it was to teach them to think.
Agata Lisiak 20:16
John Allen, Massey, and other OU colleagues worked closely on course development. They also wrote and edited several textbooks together. Here's how John remembers this process.
John Allen 20:27
I mean, I have to say, it's hard to describe it. But it's an incredibly challenging environment for ideas. You're sitting in a room with colleagues, your own colleagues, exchange, you've written your own chapter or chapters, more than one, and you'd have the criticism, but you'd learn to do it in a supportive way. So you wouldn't say: 'This is rubbish'. You'd always try to be constructive. But you'd learn ways of saying that tried to help because the whole point of being critical about someone else's work in a supportive way was to get a better module overall. And over the years, we honed that ability. And that's particularly important for younger academics, when they're sitting in a room, say, with Doreen in the room, and they -- Doreen, as much as anyone else, wanted to hear what the young ones thought, the younger academic (career young) and you don't, there weren't egos in that room. But, on the other hand, every module was bigger than the sum of the individuals involved. So you couldn't be nice to people because you liked them. It had to be good, because the quality of the teaching materials was the reputation of the Open University.
Agata Lisiak 21:42
It sounds incredibly intellectually stimulating.
John Allen 21:45
It was exhausting! [laughs] But yes, it was. I mean, it was a privilege to have that. Most other teaching experiences, lecturing experiences, you're on your own delivering your own lectures. You get feedback from students, of course. What you don't get is feedback from your colleagues. And developing and producing a module was a collaborative exercise. And it could take anything from 18 months to two years to produce these courses, long time. What came out at the end was always better than what you individually put in. And you had to remember that it was worth going through the criticism because we knew by the time we'd done the third draft, this was going to be a much better piece.
Agata Lisiak 22:29
This collaborative environment, however challenging at times, produced not only excellent teaching materials, but also collegiality and friendships. Massey commuted to the Open University from her home in Kilburn. She didn't own a car, so she'd take the train from London's Euston Station, or she'd catch a ride with her neighbour, Stuart Hall, the acclaimed cultural theorist. Professor Yasmin Gunaratnam, who's a sociologist at King's College London, used to work at the Open University. She would sometimes share a taxi with Massey to the train station.
Yasmin Gunaratnam 23:03
Milton Keynes is one relentless roundabout after another, so, very concrete, but she would point out: 'Oh, look at those flowers,' or, you know, some geological facet of the environment. And it was really striking that she was attuned -- as much as she would be to the cultural nuances, perhaps, of a political speech -- she was very attuned to the natural environment in geography, and botany particularly. So, she was this huge mix of things.
Yasmin Gunaratnam 23:41
I remember talking to her about how lovely the taxi journeys were and she told me that she used to come to the OU with Stuart Hall, you know, 'cause he lived around the corner. And I remember thinking: 'Oh my god, imagine being a passenger in that journey!' [laughs] But, yeah, so I think, I've been thinking about the car as well, in terms of Doreen's life, and just thinking about intellectual spaces. You know, so we all know that learning and research and teaching just doesn't happen in, you know, the university. And so I think there's these sorts of amazing intellectual trails that probably go from Kilburn, you know, and then up the M1 to the, to Milton Keynes at that time, where Stuart and her were talking about all these amazing things.
Agata Lisiak 24:36
Maybe some of you are listening to this episode in a car, perhaps alone or with a companion. Or maybe you are sitting on the subway or on the bus. In any case, this might be a good moment to hit pause and think about your own experiences with intellectual spaces beyond established ones.
Agata Lisiak 24:54
Sometimes, Doreen Massey's taxi rides were dominated by football discussions.
Yasmin Gunaratnam 24:59
Doreen was a huge supporter of Liverpool, you know, and she really knew the game. So the conversation, you know, could be about strategy and tactics, really technical stuff. Gail Lewis was also at the Open University at the time. She's a Black feminist academic, and is also a huge football fan. And the level of detail of the conversations, you know, it was just amazing.
Agata Lisiak 25:27
But it's not just the technical stuff that they saw heatedly discussed. The politics of football were also important. Massey insisted that "the ownership of football clubs matters." She was in favour of an ownership model in which fans would have meaningful representation. And she once wrote that such an intervention into ownership structures would be part of "a wider movement against a form of economy in which nothing has value, everything has a price, and all that matters is short term gain." That kind of commitment to political thinking about all areas of life, including football, was as her friends would say...
Yasmin Gunaratnam 26:04
... typically Doreen.
Agata Lisiak 26:08
Doreen Massey is dearly missed by her friends and collaborators. As you may have noticed, some still speak about her in the present tense. And Massey's ideas do live on. In fact, while we were working on this episode, a new volume of Massey's Selected Political Writings was published. It's a carefully edited collection that includes Massey's most popular essays. We'll link to the book in the episode notes.
Agata Lisiak 26:34
Before we wrap up, I owe you a confession: I'm not a geographer. And I didn't know Massey was either, when I first came across her work. A few years ago, I was designing a university class on gender and the city. And when I read Massey's essay "Space, Place and Gender," I was instantly drawn to her writing. The places she described came alive on the page, bustling with people, connections, and sounds. I couldn't believe that a geographer wrote it. The geography I learned at school was all about continents, rivers, mountains, population density, and, above all, maps. Massey's essay was a reflection on her personal experiences in places such as football fields and museums, and a sharp analysis of how these places are gendered and classed. I immediately started reading more of her writing, and I realised I just had no idea that such fascinating work could be done under the disciplinary umbrella of geography. I soon learned that geography was a vibrant field that is so much more than drawing maps and conducting land surveys. So, I started using more geography texts in my teaching and research, and I met many geographers along the way. You've heard from some of them today, and you'll hear even more in our next episode, Geography Matters!
Agata Lisiak 27:51
As for the title of our podcast, Spatial Delight was a working title of one of Massey's most influential books, For Space. And I think it perfectly conveys the joy of geographical thinking that was so characteristic of her work.
Agata Lisiak 28:05
In this episode, we discussed the importance of democratic education as well as intellectual spaces beyond the university. As we've heard, knowledge and politics can be produced in a wide variety of places: a car, football, terraces, picket lines, council estates. We'd be curious to hear: what intellectual spaces have you encountered or actively created beyond the classroom? Please use the google form in the episode notes to share your reflections with us. And if you'd like to learn more about some of the things we discussed today, you can find a reading list and other resources on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. Last but not least, if you've enjoyed listening to Spatial Delight, please take a few seconds to subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes.
Agata Lisiak 28:55
This episode was created by Susan Stone, Reece Cox, Adele Martin, Bose Sarmiento and me, Agata Lisiak. Spatial Delight is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and hosted by the Sociological Review Foundation. Big thanks to Doreen Massey's colleagues and friends who generously shared their memories of her with us: John Allen, Ash Amin, David Featherstone, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Tariq Jazeel, Linda McDowell, Tracey Skelton, and Hilary Wainwright. Thank you for listening.