Doreen Massey was a geographer and public scholar concerned with how political action takes place not only on the level of policy, but also on the level of activism and everyday discourse. Host Agata Lisiak speaks about Massey’s political engagement with Jo Littler, Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics at City, University of London. Jo is part of the editorial collective of Soundings, the journal of politics and culture Massey co-founded in 1995.
Jo and Agata meet with James Marriott from Platform, a London-based collective of artists, activists and researchers working on social and environmental justice issues. James tells us about Massey’s involvement with Platform, her “bad behaviour” – her love of challenging the system – and her lasting impact on his thinking and action.
We also discuss Jo’s recent publications: The Care Manifesto, written with the Care Collective, and Left Feminisms, a collection of interviews with feminist activists and theorists politically engaged across a variety of issues and locations.
We’d love to hear from you: what inspires your political engagement? When do you decide to act and what formats, tools, or tactics do you use? What are the joys and challenges of political collaborations that you’ve encountered? Please fill out this form to share your thoughts with us.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: Jo Littler, James Marriott
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Also mentioned:
Doreen Massey was a geographer and public scholar concerned with how political action takes place not only on the level of policy, but also on the level of activism and everyday discourse. Host Agata Lisiak speaks about Massey’s political engagement with Jo Littler, Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics at City, University of London. Jo is part of the editorial collective of Soundings, the journal of politics and culture Massey co-founded in 1995.
Jo and Agata meet with James Marriott from Platform, a London-based collective of artists, activists and researchers working on social and environmental justice issues. James tells us about Massey’s involvement with Platform, her “bad behaviour” – her love of challenging the system – and her lasting impact on his thinking and action.
We also discuss Jo’s recent publications: The Care Manifesto, written with the Care Collective, and Left Feminisms, a collection of interviews with feminist activists and theorists politically engaged across a variety of issues and locations.
We’d love to hear from you: what inspires your political engagement? When do you decide to act and what formats, tools, or tactics do you use? What are the joys and challenges of political collaborations that you’ve encountered? Please fill out this form to share your thoughts with us.
Episode Credits
Host: Agata Lisiak
Guests: Jo Littler, James Marriott
Writer and Producer: Agata Lisiak
Senior Editor: Susan Stone
Sound Producer: Reece Cox
Production Assistant: Adèle Martin
Music: Studio R
Artwork: Bose Sarmiento
In partnership with: The Sociological Review Foundation
Funded by: Volkswagen Foundation
Find more about Spatial Delight at The Sociological Review.
Episode Resources
Doreen Massey’s work quoted or mentioned in this episode:
Also mentioned:
Jo Littler reading Doreen Massey 0:02
"There are many different ways of being a 'public scholar'. ... Venturing beyond the confines of academe involves linking up with another assemblage of concerns, interests and aims, in which your position has to be negotiated. What will be your role? What will be your voice? And what will be the degree and nature of the responsibility to which you commit yourself? These questions are in part pragmatic and practical; but they're also a matter, in themselves, of politics and political responsibility. They also complicate, and often challenge, the official discourses of 'dissemination', 'application', 'relevance', and 'impact'".
Agata Lisiak 0:39
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. Our podcast is inspired by Doreen Massey, a British geographer and public scholar who was politically engaged across different contexts and places: locally in her adopted city of London, nationally in the UK, and across the globe, most notably in Latin America. In previous episodes, we discussed Massey's work in Venezuela and her involvement in municipal socialist projects. This episode, we will talk in more detail about her political engagement through writing, collaborations with artists, public interventions and local activism.
Agata Lisiak 1:25
Last month, in February 2023, I traveled to London to speak with some of Doreen Massey's former collaborators. It was quite a tumultuous moment to be in the UK: the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, the crisis of care. Workers from many different sectors went on strike: nurses, teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, mail workers and my colleagues in academia too. All demanding better working conditions and calling for higher wages and salaries that would reflect the rising prices. It was inspiring to see faculty, staff and students united in a struggle for a better, more just university.
Agata Lisiak 2:08
On one of the few non-strike days, I met with Jo Littler in her office at City, University of London. Jo is Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics. Her wide-ranging research on inequalities and power includes work on meritocracy, neoliberal narratives, consumerism and cultural politics. She's a publicly engaged scholar and political commentator, and she's part of the editorial collective of Soundings, the journal of politics and culture, which Doreen Massey co-founded in 1995.
Agata Lisiak 2:40
Hi, Jo! Thanks for joining me for this podcast.
Jo Littler 2:42
Thanks for inviting me.
Agata Lisiak 2:44
Do you remember when you first came across Doreen Massey's work?
Jo Littler 2:48
I think it was probably when I was a student, a PhD student at the University of Sussex, and I was part of a feminist theory reading group, and we read Space, Place and Gender. I remember seeing some of her other work at that time as well and in particular being struck by the passage that I think you mentioned in one of the earlier podcasts where she talks about the football fields, looking at them when she's on the bus, going from Wythenshawe to the centre of Manchester and thinking about how so many fields are given over to men and boys. And that really, it's a really vivid example. It also resonated because even though I was born in the south of England, I spent my formative years in the north, about a mile away from Wythenshawe, where Doreen grew up. So I knew that bus route. So there was an extra layer of resonances as well.
Agata Lisiak 3:45
And when did you first meet her?
Jo Littler 3:47
I think I probably first met her at a Soundings meeting. So I joined the editorial board a couple of years after it was first formed as the book reviews editor. And we used to have meetings in one of the founding editors' houses or Doreen's flat. So I would have met her at the meetings then. And she was very enthusiastic and cheery and dynamic. So she was always very encouraging of everyone in the room when they had what she thought was a good idea or just when she wanted to encourage them. My memory of her is someone that would nod all the time, very much, and generally try to be enthusiastic and encouraging.
Agata Lisiak 4:34
Can you tell us a bit more about Soundings?
Jo Littler 4:37
Yeah, so it was set up by Stuart Hall and Doreen and Mike Rustin who wanted to create a journal that would bridge academia and public debate and would provide a way to look at the cultural moment and power dynamics of the present -- or the conjuncture, as cultural studies likes to say -- from different disciplinary angles. So typically, you have articles in it that a lot of them would be by academics, but they would write in a way that would explain complex terms to a lay reader who wasn't familiar with academic debates. They would try and translate those academic terms of reference and also keep footnotes to a minimum.
Agata Lisiak 5:23
In the obituary you and Jeremy Gilbert wrote for Doreen Massey, you say that "it's difficult to think of a British scholar of her stature who remained so consistently and directly engaged in immediate political activities alongside rigorous academic work".
Jo Littler 5:39
Yeah, that's definitely true. I mean, Doreen was an academic who would turn up to a workshop or symposium or an event if she thought it was important, no matter if there were two people or ten people there. She was really lively and vibrant and energetic. She was a huge ball of energy. And it was very common to go to different events and see her there getting stuck in, talking to people from different backgrounds. So Doreen really saw politics happening in a variety of spaces and places, and she was concerned with how political action took place at not only the level of Parliament or the level of policy, but the level of activism and everyday discourse. So she would regularly encourage people -- on the Soundings board, for example -- to just ring in to the radio, ring up Radio 5 and talk to chat shows and get your voice heard, get an alternative perspective across. So that approach to thinking about politics as multifaceted really shows how she was concerned not only with analysis, but also the point is to change it, thinking about how you could change through a multiplicity of routes.
Agata Lisiak 6:53
Soundings was and remains one of the many different forms of political engagement, and it wasn't the only project on which Doreen Massey worked together with Stuart Hall and Mike Rustin. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, they wrote a text critiquing the neoliberal order and named it after the London neighbourhood in which they all lived.
Jo Littler 7:12
Yes, that's right. So the Kilburn Manifesto is a publication that is an offshoot of Soundings. It's an edited collection which features lots of pieces which were first published in Soundings and look at different dimensions of the neoliberal crisis, including generation, environmentalism, politics. And the introduction is co written, as you said, by those three editors and takes its name from the area in which they all were living and in which they could see cultural and social changes happening around them.
Agata Lisiak 7:52
When we took you to Kilburn in Episode 3, we saw those cultural and social changes in action. The Kilburn Manifesto has an important section about the connections between neoliberalism and climate change. As a geographer, Doreen Massey was attuned to the catastrophic transformations of our planet. She was involved in a range of different projects that combined the ecological and political. Even though she's been gone for several years now, Massey's collaborators continue the work she inspired. Jo and I went to the British Library to meet one of them.
James Marriott 8:26
I'm James Marriott. I work as an artist and an activist, and I work as part of a group of people in Platform, we bring together artists, activists, educationists and researchers, and we work together on social justice and ecological justice issues. And that's what I do.
Agata Lisiak 8:49
And you're also a writer. You're a co author, with Terry McAllister, of a book titled Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation. The book's dedication says: for Doreen Massey, the next generation. But you don't make any direct references to Doreen Massey's work in your book other than in the acknowledgement where you mention her as one of the thinkers "whose work greatly assisted you". So can you tell us more about the dedication? Why this one? Why Doreen Massey on the first page of your book?
James Marriott 9:22
Well, Doreen helped me in my thinking so much. I feel incredibly lucky. I thank the gods that I met her, really. We seemed to get into the habit of going to the same restaurant endlessly and sitting and talking for hours and hours and hours and hours until they closed it down around us. For me, any kind of book like Crude Britannia takes quite a long time of gestation. And during that time, I spent a lot of time talking with Doreen. Doreen helped me a lot in trying to frame, think about and structure the work that became Crude Britannia in a chronological way, I think. It was great. She was just amazing. We talked about it a lot. For me, it's a real regret that a) she couldn't read the whole manuscript and b) I couldn't give her a copy, but, you know, a dedication will do.
James Marriott 10:23
Doreen didn't have any kids. I don't think she ever really wanted any kids. But she built this family around her. She unconsciously created a family of people who were very close to her and very affectionate towards her. I love the idea of people making a family through their thinking and their imagination. And that therefore there's a strange connection that I have with other people, who I don't really know, but I know that they love the same person so at some base level, they must be good, do you know what I mean? In the same way as this is my brother or my sister, okay, well, I'll give it a go. And that's a lovely thing, actually. That sense of family of thought. It's really special.
Agata Lisiak 11:12
All of Doreen Massey's friends and collaborators that I spoke to emphasised how curious she was about the world: always interested in new projects and the people who make them. Platform was one of them.
James Marriott 11:23
Platform has been going about 40 years now and, as I mentioned before, the aim of the work is to bring people together from different disciplines -- arts, activism, education, research -- to try to engage together in questions of social and ecological justice, to try and undertake work which provokes change. Change, obviously, is a fluid thing, but that's the constant intent. I keep on coming back to Doreen because I think Doreen, for me, was a very subtle thinker, she was a very agile thinker. She could cope with the fact that the world changed around her and she needed to change her thinking and do that. She embodied that sense. She wasn't fazed by new changes in the world. So she had a whole set of thinking in the 60s, a whole set of thinking in the 70s, 80s, and always changing and developing. I think we've tried to do the same -- whether or not we can do it as well as Doreen, I don't know -- but we tried to do the same, which is to say: okay, the way that we do what we do in the 80s has got to be very different from the way that we do what we do in the 2020s.
James Marriott 12:35
It's worth saying something, perhaps, about how we came into contact with Doreen. And it's funny because when I think about it, I think it's just... It's kind of classic Doreen, really. She didn't turn up and go: I'm here, I'm Doreen Massey, pay attention to me. She just sort of drifted in. She was suddenly involved. She was writing to us. Who's this person? I don't know this person. We were very, very honoured and touched. Jesus, we're trying to make this stuff, we haven't got any, we can't get it together, oh my god, we're bust again. And yet here's this person paying attention to us. It was really amazing, actually, very honouring. The care and attention that she did was just powerful, I think. We did a project in 1992-93 called Homeland, which was trying to look at the relationship of London to the world beyond, as it were. And the structure of it -- it was a piece of theatre -- the structure of it was, it engaged the audience and the participants in a coal mine in Wales, a copper mine in Portugal, and a light bulb factory in Hungary. And we used those places, we worked with those places to try and engage the audience in London to understand how light came into their lives. So obviously coal, which is electricity, copper, which is the means by which the electricity passes from the power station to your house and then a light bulb, this thing you stick in the ceiling. And so, in a way, the thing was a way of theatricalising and performing that sense of periphery, as it were. And I had no idea about it, but that was smack bang in the way of Doreen's thinking. I think she went: Oh, that lot, they're up to tricks, you know. And it was part of the London International Festival of Theatre. And we just got on immediately.
Agata Lisiak 14:34
Massey continued her collaboration with Platform over many years. Besides James Marriott, she worked closely with energy analyst Mika Minio-Paluello and campaigner Anna Galkina. Platform wrote a contribution to the Kilburn Manifesto titled Energy Beyond Neoliberalism. Another important project involved one of the most famous museums in the world.
James Marriott 14:53
We were trying to push Tate to break its sponsorship deal with BP, and it was hard, they were being difficult. And there were lots of different groups involved; Liberate Tate was amazing. But one thing Mika, particularly, and Anna Galkina, did was to say: Okay, we're going to have a festival in the Tate. We're just going to squat it and have a festival to celebrate Tate without the sponsorship. We're going to have this event and we're going to squat the main part and we're going to do it and it's going to happen. It was like, Okay, let's do that, it's pretty crazy. So we literally smuggled in chairs and desks and things and set them up in the middle and then we had panel discussions. And of course, who turned up, was very happy to do it, was Doreen. Again, I just love that naughtiness of her because now I understand, you know, there are lots of other academics, bless them, who would go: Oh, I can't be involved in this basically pirate thing, they squatted the main gallery and they're going to get kicked out any time. Because if I do that, then I'll be struck off the list of being a proper Tate talker person. And she'd done lots of stuff for Tate, big stuff, you know. But no, no, no, Doreen, because she was basically badly behaved a lot of the time, was great. She's just like: Right, let's do this! And in she marched and bang, she held, you know, I loved her for that. I really loved her. Badly behaved.
Agata Lisiak 16:31
What James describes as "bad behaviour", reminds me of what Massey said about the places that she felt "were designed to, or had the effect of, firmly letting [her] know her conventional subordination". A fancy museum such as the Tate would be exactly the type of place to inspire in Massey an overwhelming desire to prick its portentous self-importance. If you're interested to find out more about this kind of space invading, make sure to listen to Episode 6 with Nirmal Puwar.
Agata Lisiak 17:02
I started working on this podcast in April 2022. Back then, Boris Johnson was the UK's Prime Minister. Now, in March 2023, it's Rishi Sunak. And there were a bizarre few weeks in between when it was Liz Truss. In less than a year, the country has had not only three different Prime Ministers, but also three Home Secretaries, each priding themselves on creating ever more inhumane anti-migration policies. Political scandals abound and the cost of living crisis is worsening the country's already high poverty rates. It can be challenging to keep up with these dynamic changes and to find the energy to stay engaged.
James Marriott 17:42
I quite enjoy the process of asking Doreen questions. I mean, okay, physically she's dead, but she's still around. There are things that happen, I mean, like in the middle of the complete Truss mayhem, part of my brain was going: so what do you make of that, Doreen? That's just madness. I mean, she would have been all over this, if she was physically alive as well. And in some ways, I don't grieve Doreen's passing. I don't miss her in the sense of like, where is she? I wish she was here because I feel I'm learning from her and thinking about what she's thought about. But I guess I miss her commentary on things that have happened since she died.
Agata Lisiak 18:35
Many of the conversations James Marriott had with Doreen Massey, while she was still alive, revolved around the workings of neoliberalism. When we met in her office, I asked Jo Littler about her work on this topic.
Agata Lisiak 18:49
The pandemic poignantly reveals the failure of the neoliberal state to provide proper care, and it also sharply exacerbated the many gender and racial inequalities with regard to care. In the first year of the pandemic, in 2020, you and your comrades from the Care Collective published a short book called The Care Manifesto. What ignited that project?
Jo Littler 19:11
Well, the five of us came together because we were all interested in some way or other with care. We worked from different disciplines, different backgrounds, come from three different continents, but we were all interested in this topic and in particular how we seem to be surrounded socially by such extreme and increasing forms of structural carelessness. So we thought about this a lot and talked about it and we effectively had a reading group where we'd look at different pieces of work. And then we decided that we would like to write something short and diagnostic and forward looking that became The Care Manifesto. And in this we start off by diagnosing the ills of contemporary neoliberal carelessness, looking at all the different dimensions of the crisis and then we look at what it would mean to put care central to social life and to try and imagine societies which did prioritise care at every scale of life. And so we take, chapter by chapter, we try to sketch out what that would mean, drawing from both contemporary progressive examples and ones in the past. So we look at care and environmentalism, care and politics, care and community, care and social dynamics.
Agata Lisiak 20:40
And in relation to the pandemic?
Jo Littler 20:43
Yes, so we were just finishing up writing what is essentially a long pamphlet when the pandemic happened. And then we decided to try and build the pandemic into the manifesto at the beginning and the end. You know, we hastily wrote some more sentences for the introduction, for example. And then we ended up talking about the manifesto a lot online because suddenly all discussions went online and that was great to be able to connect to a lot of people who are interested in this question of care from all different kinds of political and activist angles. And then, of course, the question of care was being redefined in the pandemic and becoming central at that time in terms of what we need to be a caring society, how it was that carers were being so hideously marginalised and abandoned. So for instance, you only have to think about how there wasn't sufficient protective gear that nurses could have or people in care homes could have. The government didn't have sufficient policies to protect people in care homes, and the pandemic ripped through there, which, of course, connects to the way in which care provision has been so ruthlessly privatised, consolidating the fact that care work is often so badly paid and something that disproportionately women and people of colour carry out.
Agata Lisiak 22:15
By the time this episode comes out in the spring of 2023, listeners will have a chance to read your latest book titled Left Feminisms. It's a collection of interviews you conducted over many years with feminist thinkers and activists including Veronica Gago, Akwugo Emejulu, Hilary Wainwright and many others. As you write in the introduction, you wish you had interviewed Doreen Massey, too, but you never got around to it and then she suddenly died in 2016.
Jo Littler 22:43
I was interviewing people that I'd been very influenced by or was very interested in their work who tended to be significantly older than me. I wanted to interview bell hooks as well as Doreen and many other people too, but you know, you can't do everything. And then as the interview project went on, I started to interview people who were of similar age to me and younger as well, so it expanded. The book is a collection of interviews with different feminist thinkers or theorists from the left. It started out as interviews that I'd done in Soundings. Not necessarily all of them were about feminism to begin with, quite a few were about environmentalism, for example, or consumerism. But then, gradually, I realised that I was drawn again and again to interviewing feminists on the left for more different disciplines. I was very interested in the different and divergent histories there were and also in this strand of left feminism or socialist feminism -- you know, people give it different names -- which often seemed to be both most palpable in academia, that was the place where it was valued and in which its histories were recorded, but also for someone that had been growing up in the 80s and 90s, it seemed to have a history that was disavowed or not spoken about. And I think that's changed now. You just have to look at the rebirth of quite divergent, creative forms of left and socialist movements, for all the flaws, that have been given a new form of vitality over the past five, ten years and how, for example, there are the surveys now which say that more millennials identify as socialist than capitalist in the US. This is to say that the ground or the conjuncture towards the issues have changed a lot since I started doing the book.
Agata Lisiak 25:03
We started this episode mentioning various forms of crises: the care crisis, the cost of living crisis, the crisis in higher education, the environmental crisis. How do left feminisms, in your opinion, offer approaches to tackle these issues?
Jo Littler 25:21
Well, they offer a wide range of options to tackle the issues, and some of them will deal with the question of crisis head on. But perhaps what left feminism can bring to the table is, historically, an understanding that it's not just the economy and paid work that we need to look at, but that we also need to broaden out the discussion of crisis, to think about social reproduction, to think about the unpaid social domain, all the unpaid care work that is done to support people's lives. And beyond that, of course, they're very divergent. So there's left feminisms that are very concerned with extractivism. Sofia Siddiqui and Veronica Gago both talked about that, for example. And there are left feminisms that are very concerned with party politics. So there's a whole range of different approaches.
Agata Lisiak 26:21
I asked Jo what she found inspiring about Doreen Massey's feminism.
Jo Littler 26:26
She had a long standing engagement in issues of equality and politics, and in which she had a quite unique take on gender and space and was so formative and influential for people in terms of thinking about how space is gendered and how the surroundings that we live in are subject to gender norms and traditions that might not be visible or palpable at first glance. And at the same time, because she had such wide ranging and interesting series of political engagements from Latin America to Kilburn, from the Open University to the Social Forums. And so to have her reflect upon those different types of engagement, bringing her energy and lack of snobbery and everyday enthusiasm for political change would have been refreshing and interesting.
Agata Lisiak 27:38
Massey's passion for political change offers a lasting inspiration not only for her close collaborators like Jo and James, but also for many others who have engaged with her work, even those who didn't know her personally. In this episode, we discussed various examples of political engagement: from a picket line to a journal or a manifesto, from art interventions to simply calling up radio programs to voice concerns and offer analysis. Doreen Massey found it important to work across different formats and with many different people to address intersecting issues and reach wide audiences. She was keen on collaborating and learning from the people she met. And as we heard, her curiosity seemed boundless.
Agata Lisiak 28:25
We'd love to hear from you: what inspires your political engagement? When do you decide to act and what formats, tools or tactics do you use? What are the joys and challenges of political collaborations that you've encountered? Please fill out the form linked in the show notes to share your thoughts with us. To learn more about the things we discussed today, visit the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. That's where you'll find reading recommendations and other links. Today's episode was created by Susan Stone, Reece Cox, Adèle 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 our guests, Jo Littler and James Marriott. Thank you for listening.