Information about the author
“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.”
Doreen Massey (2004) Geographies of responsibility
Link to article
Summary
tekst
Quotes
"There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions……………...this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both." (p.5)
Changing identities:
"Thinking space relationally …has of course been bound up with a wider set of conceptualisations. In particular it has been bound up with a significant refiguring of the nature of identity……This is an argument which has its precise parallel in the reconceptualisation of spatial identities. An understandig of the relational nature of space has been accompanied by arguments about the relational construction of the identity of place. If space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we make space through interactions at all levels.....These theoretical reformulations have gone alongside and been deeply entangled with political commitment." (p.5)
"….rethinking identity has been a crucial theoretical complement to a politics which is suspicious of foundational essentialims; a politics which, rather than claiming 'rights' for pregiven identities based on assumptions of authenticity, argues that it is as least as important to challange the identities themselves and thus - a fortiori - the relations through which those identities have been established. " (p.5)
"What I want to do in this paper is to push further this pondering over the space and times of identity and to enquire how they may be connected op with the question of political responsibility." (p.6)
The question:
"If we take seriously the relational construction of identity, then it poses, first, the question of the geography of those relations of construction: the geography through which the identity (of Londen) is established and reproduced. This in turn poses the question, of what is the nature of the social and political relationships to those geographies. What is, in a relational imagination and in light of the relational construction of identity, the geography of our social and political responsibility?" (p.6) (Zie ook Gibson-Graham; beschrijven hoe die er volgens hen uit kan zien. Andere taal, andere verhalen. En emoties. Voorbij verzet komen. Ervaren ook dat het anders kan. En dat je niet hetzelfde moet zijn om community gevoel te hebben)
"Such struggles over place, and the meaningfulness in and of place, return to the argument that in any even minimal recognition of the relational construction of space and identity, place must me a site of negotiation, and that often this will be conflictual negotiation." (p.7)
"Indeed, the process of what they call 'resubjectivation' is an essential tool in J.K. Gibson-Graham's attempt to work through an active politics of place in the context of globalisation." (p.7)
"One important dimension of the phenomenological position is that the meanigful relation to place is intimately bound up with the embodied nature of perception……place must be distuinguishable from simple locatedness. " (p. 8)
"If space is to be really thought relationally…..then global space is no more than the sum of relations, connections, embodimentsand practices. These things are utterly everyday and grounded at the same time as the maym when linked together, go around the world. ....How can that kind of groundedness be made meaningfull across distance? This is an issue beacause, centainly in Westerns societies, there is a hegemonic geography of care and responsibility which takes the form of a nested set of Russian dolls. First there is 'home' than perhaps place and locality, than nation, and so on." (p.9)
"Many reasons for that Russian doll geography…the still remainig impact of physical proximity. The persistant focus on parent-child relationships as the iconic reference point for questions of care and responsibility. There are all the rhetorics of territory, of nation and family, through which we are daily urged to construct our maps of loyalty and affect." (p.9) (Heel belangrijk dit. Andere verhalen tegenover stellen. Zie de verhalen van ouderen en slechte realties met familie. Dat is vaak, ook bij jongeren nog, een belangrijk referentiepunt)
Identity and responsibility:
"I believe this can be linked up with Gibson-Graham's writing in this area. Her argument is that one necessary component in the project of reimagining 'the power differential embedded in the binaries of global and local, space and place (p.29) is a reformulating of local identities. For her a central aspect of this 'resubjectivation' is an imaginative leap in which we can learn 'to think not about the world as subjected to globalization (and the global capitalist economy) but how we are subjected to the discourse of globalization and the identities (and narratives) it dictates to us." (p.10)
"The work of Gibson-Graham has been important in articulating an argument that 'the local' too, has agency. She also argues, crucially, that it is important both theoretically and politically to distuinguish between various contrasting formulations of this agency." (p. 10)
"Gibson-Graham….a form of re-imagination, of an alternative understanding, which she argues is an essential element in the redistribution of the potential for agency: an attempt to get out from under the position of thinking one's identity as simply 'subject to' globalisation: it is a process which goes hand in hand with inhabiting and reforming identity through engagement in embodied political practice." (p.11)
Doreen Massey (1994) A global sense of place
Summary
tekst
Quotes
"One of the results of this (a new phase of internationalization / speed up / time-space compression) is an increasing uncertainty about what we mean by 'places' and how we relate to them." (p.1)
"An (idealized) notion of an era when places were (supposedly) inhabited by coherent and homogeneous communities is set against a look that refers to fragmentation and disruption. According to Massey The counterposition is anyway dubious, of course; 'place' and 'community' have only rarely been coterminous. One of the effects of such responses is that place itself, the seeking after a sense of place, has come to be seen by some as necessarily reactionary." (p.1)
"But is that necessarily so? Can't we rethink out sense of place? Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-closing and defensive, but outward-looking? A sense of place which is adequate to this era?" (p.1)
"How, in the context of all these socially varied time-space changes do we think about 'places'? "
Een vraag die hiermee samenhangt is: "how then do we think about 'locality'?" (p.4). Zie ook Gibson Graham
"We need therefore to think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global-local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and which would be useful in what are, after all, political struggles often inevitably based on place. The question is how to hold on to that notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without being reactionary." (p.5)
"If it is now recognized that people have multiple identities then the same point can me made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can either be a source of richness or a source of conflict, or both." (p.5)
"One of the problems identified here seems to be a persistant identification of place with 'community'. Yet it is a misidentification. p.6 Misplaatste zoektocht naar sociale cohesie. Om dat tegen te gaan werken met het concept care."
For what is happening is that the geography of social relations is changing. In many cases such relations are increasingly stretched out over space. Amin zegt hierover:
"It is from that perspective that is it possible to envisage an alternative interpretation of place." (p.6)
"There seems to be….a number of ways in which a progressive concept of place might be developed. First of all it is absolutely not static. If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social relations in which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time. They are processes." (p.8)
"Second, they do not have boundarys….Do not have single unique identities; they are full of internal conflicts……none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place in continualy reproduced. ….There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise... that history itself imagined as a layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world. " (p.8)
Doreen Massey
Formele omschrijving
A Global Sense of Place (1994). From Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schema: ZHDSM scheme,
Context: ZHDSM context
Referenties
- Doreen Massey (2004) Geographies of Responsibility, Doreen Massey, Geographie Annals, 1 januari 2004.