“[This is] a collection of articles not on Doreen Massey’s work, but rather on how different scholars and activists, many of them Massey’s colleagues and friends, have developed their own ideas informed by hers … Gathering together a bunch of colleagues, activists, artists and political figures, each contributor offers an overview of how their main concerns relate to, or have benefited from, Massey’s concepts. For the scope and significance of her ideas seem to have been enormous; just think of the very different disciplines that have benefited from her spatial vision (take only the ones present in the book: political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, even the arts, not to mention the practice of politics itself) … Here we have a group of scholars … taking Massey’s work in new and exciting directions, and we have eighteen excellent examples of how to do it.” (Antipode , 1 September 2013)
Doreen Massey has transformed contemporary understandings of space, place and politics. This book critically interrogates her ground-breaking contributions to geography and to political debate. Former graduate students, colleagues, geographers and other social scientists, join together with artists, political figures and activists to engage with her ideas. These specially commissioned essays take their inspiration from her style of rigorous theorizing animated by political engagement.
Doreen Massey’s geography has always been informed by her involvement with the international women’s movement, socialist experiments in Venezuela and Nicaragua and the Greater London Council of the 1980s, then at the height of its rearguard action against Thatcherite neoliberalism. This landmark text offers a comprehensive overview of her work to date, a series of political and scholarly reflections upon it, and a set of directions for the further development of her ideas. Through serious reflection on Doreen Massey’s contributions the book provides intellectual tools and resources for re-shaping our geographical and political futures.
From the Back Cover
Doreen Massey has transformed contemporary understandings of space, place and politics. This book critically interrogates her ground-breaking contributions to geography and to political debate. Former graduate students, colleagues, geographers and other social scientists, join together with artists, political figures and activists to engage with her ideas. These specially commissioned essays take their inspiration from her style of rigorous theorizing animated by political engagement.
Doreen Massey’s geography has always been informed by her involvement with the international women’s movement, socialist experiments in Venezuela and Nicaragua and the Greater London Council of the 1980s, then at the height of its rearguard action against Thatcherite neoliberalism. This landmark text offers a comprehensive overview of her work to date, a series of political and scholarly reflections upon it, and a set of directions for the further development of her ideas. Through serious reflection on Doreen Massey’s contributions the book provides intellectual tools and resources for re-shaping our geographical and political futures.
About the Author
David Featherstone is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow, UK. He studied with Doreen Massey for a PhD at the Open University in the late 1990s. His research focuses on transnational social movements and on the relations between space and politics. He is the author of Resistance Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global Networks (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), and Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (2012).
Joe Painter is Professor of Geography at Durham University, UK. He also gained his PhD with Doreen Massey at the Open University, a decade earlier than his co-editor. The author (with Alex Jeffrey) of Political Geography: An Introduction to Space and Power (2009), his current research focuses on the prosaic geographies of the state.