“A lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the all too many years when I’ve been writing about space,” she told interviewer Nigel Warburton in a 2013 Social Science Bites interview that remains one of our most popular, “is to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.”

Massey’s academic career combined that geographer’s focus on space with an advocate’s focus on inequality and class. Early in her career she theorized about the spatial divisions of labor, which she would describe as ‘power geography.’ She debuted that class-based thesis which while working at London’s Centre for Environmental Studies, a think tank where she took her first posting after studies at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2005 she wrapped her arms around her conceptions of space – and pleas to reinvigorate how we perceive it –for the SAGE-published For Space (three free chapters from the book are available below). In its opening lines, she wrote, “I’ve been thinking about ‘space’ for a long time. But usually I’ve come at it indirectly, through some other kind of engagement. The battles over globalization, the politics of place, the question of regional inequality, the engagements with ‘nature’ as I walk the hills, the complexities of cities. … I have become convinced both that the implicit assumptions we make about space are important and that, maybe, it could be productive to think about space differently.”