Much of our world – how we imagine it, how we inhabit it – continues to be shaped by various forms of imperialism and colonialism. In this episode, we discuss how geography can help us understand the many entanglements of the global and the local.
Doreen Massey thought geographically about everything. She rejected the neat, linear ideas of spatial difference that have long shaped western geographical imaginations. Massey challenged western scientists, including herself, to stop pretending their position was in any way universal, and to provincialise their questions and theories instead.
What has shaped your geographical imagination? What – or who – has challenged the way you understand the world? How does geography matter to you? Please use this form to share your thoughts.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: John Allen, David Featherstone, Tariq Jazeel, Linda McDowell, Tracey Skelton
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 Todd
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Much of our world – how we imagine it, how we inhabit it – continues to be shaped by various forms of imperialism and colonialism. In this episode, we discuss how geography can help us understand the many entanglements of the global and the local.
Doreen Massey thought geographically about everything. She rejected the neat, linear ideas of spatial difference that have long shaped western geographical imaginations. Massey challenged western scientists, including herself, to stop pretending their position was in any way universal, and to provincialise their questions and theories instead.
What has shaped your geographical imagination? What – or who – has challenged the way you understand the world? How does geography matter to you? Please use this form to share your thoughts.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: John Allen, David Featherstone, Tariq Jazeel, Linda McDowell, Tracey Skelton
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 Todd
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Doreen Massey 0:02
A lot of what I've been trying to do over the all too many years when I've been writing about space is to bring space alive, to dynamise it and to make it relevant, to emphasise how important space is in the lives in which we live and in the organisation of the societies in which we live. (Doreen Massey speaking on the Social Science Bites podcast, 2013, recording used with permission)
Agata Lisiak 0:21
Hello and welcome to Spatial Delight, a podcast about space, society and power. I'm your host, Agata Lisiak, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin. In Episode One, we took a close look at the life of Doreen Massey, a British academic, educator and public intellectual. This second episode will focus on the discipline she loved: geography, and why it matters.
Agata Lisiak 0:48
Geography is a vast discipline. Physical geography is the study of the Earth, including fields such as climatology, oceanography, glaciology, among many others. Human geography focuses on people's relations in and with various environments. This field is then subdivided into cultural geography, economic geography, urban geography, and so on. The fact that geography encompasses both natural and social sciences was one reason Massey felt so attracted to it.
Doreen Massey 1:21
In an age which is faced by environmental problems such as we have, with climate change, with pollution questions, which are utterly social too, then I do think the natural and the social sciences need to talk to each other more. And geography maybe is one of the places that could happen and one of the reasons I love the discipline. (Doreen Massey speaking on the Social Science Bites podcast, 2013, recording used with permission)
Agata Lisiak 1:39
In order to better understand geography's vast scope and Massey's place within it, I spoke to Professor Linda McDowell. She's a leading figure in British feminist geography and Massey's former colleague at the Open University.
Linda McDowell 1:52
Doreen had a very good description of it. So she said, in the social sciences, sociology, economics, politics have an object, so: the economy, the society and so forth. So they're disciplines that focus on that. Whereas geography, she said, is what, what she called a synthetic discipline. So it puts together arguments made in other disciplines and explains how space and place alters the explanations. It's a really good discipline, I think, at the undergraduate level, where people understand the connections between society, space and nature, those were Doreen's three key terms. And you could say physical, environmental, and social, you know. Why earth surface processes matter and affect the economy and society and so forth. I noticed you don't have degrees in geography, do you?
Agata Lisiak 2:48
No, no, I'm not a geographer. That's also something that I reveal in the first episode.
Linda McDowell 4:08
So it's very interesting that you're drawn to it.
Agata Lisiak 2:56
Why am I so drawn to it? While working on this podcast, I've done some thinking about my relationship with geography. And I think it goes way back. I'm pretty sure I learned how to read maps before I learned to read books. My father was a sailor, he was away much of the time. As a child, I would often try to picture where he was because I knew he was out there, I knew I had a father, I just didn't know where he was. 'At sea' sounded so abstract. So I would ask my mom and she would point to a dot on the map: Osaka, Sao Paulo, Rotterdam. But by the time she pointed to a place on the map, my dad wasn't there anymore. We only knew where he had been. By the time his next letter arrived, he would already be somewhere else, headed to another port. That was way before the internet, of course. Today, we would have probably FaceTimed each other regardless of our locations. But back in 1980s Poland we didn't even have a landline. We relied on letters, and those would take weeks to arrive. What this experience helped me realise, even at that early age, is that we cannot think of any place as separate from time. Space and time are tightly interwoven. That's something Doreen Massey referred to as space-time.
Agata Lisiak 4:13
So, as a little girl, I spent many hours slouched over our atlas, tracing shorelines with my finger, marvelling at the different shades of blue, trying to imagine the vast expanse of the ocean and the dangerous storms my father told me about.
Agata Lisiak 4:34
It's only recently that I found out that Doreen Massey also hovered over maps as a child.
Doreen Massey 4:39
I was lucky enough to have an atlas and a globe at home when I was a kid. And just one of the stories I tell at the beginning of one of the books I wrote, a really theoretical book, but to try and explain this passion for geography, is about how I used to sit in bed at night and spin the globe or turn the pages of the atlas and just close my eyes and jam my finger down and see where it landed. And if it landed on land, to try and imagine what time it was in that place, what the people were doing there, what season it was, you know, what kind of landscape it was, what kind of people. Incredibly naive, I was a young kid. Even then, there was some kind of spirit of curiosity and inquiry about the wider world, which must have been one of the ingredients that led me into being a geographer. I've certainly still got it. (excerpt from Doreen Massey's lecture “Space, Place and Politics,” Open University, 2009, recording used with permission)
Agata Lisiak 5:28
Massey's fellow geographer from the Open University, Professor John Allen, echoes this origin story.
John Allen 5:35
Doreen - and it's gonna sound like an exaggeration, but - Doreen was born a geographer. She's the only person I know - and I met, obviously, a lot of geographers in my time - who actually thinks geographically about everything, thinks through the spatial relationships of every particular political issue that comes up.
Agata Lisiak 6:01
When you look up Doreen Massey online, you will see that she's sometimes referred to as a Marxist geographer, a feminist geographer, a human geographer, a cultural geographer and so on. So what kind of geographer was she?
John Allen 6:13
She was a geographer who always thought about it politically. I always thought the term 'spatial politics' captured some of the things that she did, that way of thinking about something politically. Because it meant that every time you're thinking through geography, you don't need the label 'Marxist' or 'feminist'. You're trying to think through what difference it makes to what it is, the particular problem or issue you're talking about. What difference does geography make politically. Cause Doreen was not just interested in geography for geography's sake. There was always a purpose. And that purpose was political, because geography and its relationships was always power laden, full of inequalities and she wanted to pull those out and try to make life, make a better life for people politically.
Agata Lisiak 7:12
Another geographer, Dr. David Featherstone from the University of Glasgow, concurs.
David Featherstone 7:19
She was a geographer who was deeply influenced by feminism, but I don't think she was straightforwardly a feminist geographer, and I don't think she would have necessarily used that label straightforwardly. I think she was actually somebody who was committed to a kind of broader vision of the discipline of geography in interesting ways.
Agata Lisiak 7:38
Feminist geography is a subdivision of human geography that emerged in the 1970s in connection with the women's movement. Today, it's an established area of study with its own journals, college courses, conferences and university chairs. Massey remains associated with feminist geography because of her interest in how place and space are gendered. But her relationship with it wasn't exactly straightforward.
Linda McDowell 8:04
She wasn't involved in the group that identified itself as developing feminist geography. So she was supportive in some sense, but she wasn't visible, very visible. But of course, you know, her work influenced feminist geography and her politics did and she was involved in work in South Africa to deal with women's rights and so forth. Yes, and she was a role model, you know, a role model to other women.
Agata Lisiak 8:33
For Professor Tracey Skelton, a geographer from the National University of Singapore, Massey's feminism has a lasting impact.
Tracey Skelton 8:42
If you get labelled in some way, that's all people think you do. But the reality is, if you look at the body of work of someone like Doreen Massey, then she covers everything. She didn't need to sort of say 'I'm a feminist' because she lived and was a feminist in the sense of that, that way of thinking, but she was very inclusive in that, so she didn't make it women only or just a feminist approach. She, she drew in, you know, economic geographers and social geographers, and she was really determined to think about the ways in which we should think about how to challenge different formations of male dominance. So that was a project that came through even in the economics section, even in the social geography section, even in, in sort of, just a broader perspective on the notion of geography matters. And it was around the importance of thinking about, you know, why is it that women are always, in whatever context they're given, they're always seen as a second class or inadequate or unnoticeable. And I think that was one of the really important elements around that feminist work, because she talked about gender power relations, and she was very interested about power and how it translated.
Agata Lisiak 10:01
Massey herself explained her feminism very clearly saying: "Feminists have to be everywhere. And doing feminist geography is about a lot more than studying gender, specifically, it's an outlook on life."
Agata Lisiak 10:18
"The way we understand the geographical world and the way in which we represent it to ourselves and to others" is something that Massey and her colleagues called geographical imaginations. I asked John Allen to tell us more.
John Allen 10:32
There's an intellectual background to geographical imagination. And that, it really goes back to a book that C. Wright Mills wrote back in the 50s and 60s, a long time ago, called The Sociological Imagination. And one of the attractions of that book, at that time, was the sociological imagination, was being able to locate yourself in the wider sets of historical changes, being as the world around you changes, what's your, how do you locate yourself in those changes, so that you're not just either a victim of it, or you're responsible for everything that happens in your life. You are shaped by society, but you also shape society in turn, as an individual. And you transfer that to geography, which we did, and Derek Gregory's book came out, Geographical Imaginations - plural. At the same time, we were writing The Shape of the World. It's kind of parallel way to C. Wright Mills. It was about the ability to locate yourself geographically in a world that's changing sets of relationships and you're part of wider sets of connections, and the place of which you're part. So just because you happen to live in Kilburn, doesn't mean to say that everything that shapes your life is in Kilburn. There's always the wider sets of relationships that shape your life in particular ways. What the geographic imagination does is try to give you that sense of how you can understand the world of your, you're much part of, not a wider set of histories in this case, but a wider set of geographical changes: global, regional, local.
Agata Lisiak 12:20
As we heard in Episode One, Massey was energetically involved in the production of Open University courses and textbooks. One she worked on, which John just mentioned, was titled The Shape of the World. The books in that series were written with a sense of urgency, expanding geographical imaginations at a time of accelerated globalisation. It was the early 90s, the end of the Cold War, proliferation of trade agreements, resurgence of nationalisms. There was a widespread sense that places were becoming more and more alike, that the uniqueness of place itself was in danger, that place needed to be protected. In response, Massey and her colleagues argued that the identities of places are not monolithic. In fact, they are often contested and the battles over their meanings, sometimes literal ones, are waged in a world that is unequal.
John Allen 13:14
What Doreen wrote about the global sense of place, it captures really what she was thinking about place, what mattered in terms of place. She was very keen to make sure that place was not bounded. So even if you take Kilburn, you can't draw a line around Kilburn. That's the way Doreen saw place. Because place was always part of a wider set of interdependencies and interconnections to places elsewhere. The fortunes of places will link through these wider sets of relations. And those wider sets of relations are really what she understood by space. So the space and the place are inseparable in that kind of way. If place is not bounded, it's always part and parcel of all those other relationships that meet up in a particular place like Kilburn. That shapes it. When things change elsewhere, Kilburn changes.
Agata Lisiak 14:10
Massey rejected the neat linear ideas of spatial difference that have so long shaped western geographical imaginations. Instead, she insisted that we consider the workings of globalisation from the perspective of those who have been subjected to colonialism and imperialism. She challenged western scientists, including herself, to stop pretending their position was in any way universal, and to provincialise their questions and theories instead. Let's hear an excerpt from a lecture she gave in 2006.
Doreen Massey 14:42
When the supporters of today's form of globalisation are questioned about why, if it is such a progressive force, there is still so much poverty and inequality in the world. You ask about Mozambique, say, or Honduras. They're likely to reply: do not worry, they are behind, give us time, they will catch up. Now look at what's going on here. The whole variegated and unequal geography of the world is being reorganised into a historical queue. Geography is being turned into history, space is being turned into time. What's more, there's only one historical queue, one model of development. And it's one defined by those in the lead, the most powerful voices, the ones who designed the queue in the first place. Now, let me be clear about one thing here, I am absolutely not trying to argue against any notions of progress or development. Clean water is indubitably better than dirty water. What I do want to raise is, firstly, the possibility of different ways of progressing. And secondly, and probably in the end even more importantly, the question of who gets to decide. (excerpt from Doreen Massey’s OU Radio lecture “Is the World Really Shrinking?” 2009, recording used with permission)
Agata Lisiak 16:13
Massey was very interested in globalisation, not because it was a new phenomenon - she always argued that it wasn't - but because it captured people's imaginations. She insisted that globalisation was a political project, not some historical inevitability. Keeping in mind globalisation's imperialist legacies, Massey and her collaborators wanted to rethink it by focusing on place.
John Allen 16:38
What happened in the 90s, but also, you know, obviously, in the 80s, as well, was a much greater awareness of globalisation, much greater awareness of wider sets of relationships, global and international, that were shaping the local economies, national economies. And that relationship between the local and the global was becoming a question. It wasn't as if globalisation was new, but intellectually it was being rigorously examined. And we wanted to pick that up and think that through. So the drive of globalisation - not its newness, but how it's formed and changed - was what we were trying to get across, but not in the sense that everywhere was becoming the same, but trying to think about the relationships between the global and local in more, dare I say, a kind of dialectical way that where none of them have precedents in the sense. So the term 'geographical imagination' comes out of that thinking about how you understand those different globalisations, how globalisation locates people in particular ways - differently, not all the same - are the relationships to elsewhere. Because a lot of this was focused on the UK, simply because our students were in the UK. If we were doing it today, we'd be much more postcolonial, we'd be thinking about elsewhere not as something that simply shapes the UK. But we'd be thinking about power, sets of relationships and how caricatures of elsewhere have crept into our thinking.
Agata Lisiak 18:13
Geographers only started seriously engaging with postcolonial theory in the 1990s. This was a much needed and overdue shift. The discipline of geography has long been implicated in colonial violence and imperialist ideologies. Massey said that postcolonial scholars were working with the term globalisation in the "most provocative and productive ways". Tariq Jazeel is one of them. He's a Professor of Geography at the University College London, and wrote a book titled Postcolonialism. Tariq also worked with Doreen Massey at the Open University.
Tariq Jazeel 18:48
I always like to think about postcolonialism as a word that can't easily be defined or an area that can't easily be defined. But I do like to think about three approaches to thinking and working postcolonially. And for me, that is, firstly, to think about the postcolonial simply as a time period - after the colonial - in which case it's fair to say that much of the world is now technically postcolonial. Secondly, though, I think about postcolonialism as a reminder to engage with the ways that colonialism lingers in our present, so, the ways that colonialism lingers in the post. So the remains of colonialism, the traces of colonial encounter and colonial ways of thinking remain with us in the present. And thirdly, I think it's really important also to think about postcolonialism as a challenge or an intellectual and political challenge for us to be able to transcend some of those legacies to be able to critically intervene in them in the present.
Tariq Jazeel 20:00
Some of the earliest postcolonial theorists, postcolonial literary theorists, so people like Edward Said, for example, were concerned with geography actually. So, his book, his 1978 book Orientalism is where we first hear the term 'imaginative geography', which many of us in geography, we think it's a discipline-specific term. But no, it's a literary theorist who comes up with a term and begins to use it. And of course, Edward Said was interested in how our geographical imaginations are produced through forms of discourse, that is to say, through forms of representation, through the things we read, the things that we see on TV or the plays we watch or the music we listen to. So I think it's fair to say that if we're talking about postcolonial theory, postcolonial literary theory, all the way back, actually, it's been concerned, it's been preoccupied with space, with geography.
Agata Lisiak 21:08
Massey's concept of a global sense of place resonates with postcolonial geographies.
Tariq Jazeel 21:14
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that Doreen Massey is hugely well known for is her insistence that place, that places conceptually are always relational, that is to say that you can't easily draw lines around a place, you can't easily border a place conceptually, that is, because places are always formed at the constellation of different spatial flows that come from, come from elsewhere. So places are that which is formed at the meeting up point of all those those spatial flows. And I think that's a really valuable way to think about the history of imperialism as well. Because the Empire was something that happened, if you're based in London and you think about the Empire, yes, it's something that happened out there. But it also all came home here to London, right? So, spices and plantation commodities that were grown in far-flung corners, sugar, tea, coffee, etc. These were all products that were ultimately on sale here in London. My own family history, for example, my parents are from Sri Lanka and they, at different points in their lives, because they met in London, but they both came to London, because at some level they thought of London as their capital city. So they traced those routes across many, many miles from Ceylon, as it was then, to London. So they travelled. And there are many different ways I think that we can think about how imperialism was such a relational project.
Agata Lisiak 23:10
Much of our world - how we imagine it, how we inhabit it - continues to be shaped by various forms of imperialism and colonialism. In this episode, we discussed how geography, especially postcolonial geography, can help us understand the many entanglements of the global and the local. As Doreen Massey demonstrated, geography can also provide tools to unpack how space and place are gendered and classed. We'll talk more about this in our next episode, World City.
Agata Lisiak 23:43
Before we wrap up, a quick question for our listeners: how does geography matter to you? Were you - like Doreen Massey and I - drawn to maps as a child? What has shaped your geographical imagination? What - or who - has challenged the way you understand the world? Please fill out the google form linked in the episode notes to share your thoughts with us. To learn more about the things we discussed today, go to the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org where you'll find our reading list. Last but not least, if you've enjoyed listening to Spatial Delight, take a moment to subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
Agata Lisiak 24:21
Today's 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 today's guests: geographers John Allen, David Featherstone, Tariq Jazeel, Linda McDowell and Tracey Skelton.
Agata Lisiak 24:47
This episode is dedicated to the memory of my father, Tadeusz Lisiak, who died of COVID in April 2021.
Agata Lisiak 24:55
Thank you for listening