Social Theory: Doreen Massey

22nd Nov 2022 by Javier Bordón

“Conceptualising space as open, multiple, and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics.” (Massey 2005, 59). 

Doreen Massey’s work is extraordinarily incisive, perhaps even revolutionary, for many reasons. Her entire career was marked by a comfortable liminality (no spatial pun intended) between research and activism; between being an academic intellectual and a political practitioner. She left behind an extensive bibliography whereby geographical and spatial thought could not be dissociated from broader processes and radical questions. As a critical Marxist and feminist, economy was a constant feature in her analyses and reflections, but never at the expense of the superstructure: identity, gender and culture; matters of ontology and epistemology; and ultimately, the questioning of the social and the political, were as important for her understanding of the spatial as the relations and modes of production that Marxist geographers more typically resort to. More than anything else, Massey was concerned with the study and exposure of power. Yet her critique would not stop there. She convincingly managed to challenge our deepest assumptions within fundamental concepts (space, place, globalisation), re-think their nature, and offer an alternative notion of human existence grounded in relations instead of boundaries; in dynamic co-existence rather than static isolation. A view of the world and its making that celebrates being more considerate to each other.

Intellectual Context

Born in 1944, Doreen Massey grew up in Manchester, England. The experience of lived space, or as she would probably prefer to say, lived space-time, during her childhood had a formative effect in the kind of researcher and activist she would later become. Her family lived in the council estate of Wythenshawe, one of the new urbanising projects afforded by the emerging social welfare state in the UK. Aware of her working-class background and the opportunities that redistributive politics made available to her, Massey did not take long to sympathise with leftist ideologies and develop a genuine interest for sociospatial inequalities (AAG 2016). Given a self-situatedness located in multiple and concatenated ‘peripheries’, it is hardly surprising how this permeated into her work on de-industrialising regions, the North-South divide in England, or the systematic neglect of the many failures that make possible London’s story of success. 

After graduating from Oxford University, Massey secured a research position at the Labour-founded Centre for Environmental Studies (CES). There she focused her line of enquiry on the economic geography of different inner cities and regions across the country with the goal to inform policy-making in urban planning and economic development. These early years were instrumental for the formation of ideas that would later underpin much of her work, namely the constitutive relationships that exist between places, the concerted efforts to conceal them by those in power, and the non-neutrality of theory. 

With the arrival of Margaret Thatcher to the government in 1979 and the subsequent shutdown of the CES, the geographer started working at The Open University, where she would stay until retirement. Like with many other decisions throughout her life, The Open University represented an opportunity to practice the values of socioeconomic justice and political inclusiveness that her research and activism predicated upon. Since then, Massey embarked upon a complex and ambitious research agenda where the main questions and theoretical outputs are worked and re-worked, sometimes set aside for a while just to be taken up later, in an incessant effort to explore their possible ramifications and depth. Globalisation, gender, place, race, labour…Massey was capable of masterfully drawing the intersections amongst apparently disparate topics through the common dimension of space. In doing so, she would direct criticism towards other prominent thinkers in the field, like David Harvey and Edward Soja. On the one hand, taking issue with their excessive emphasis on the economic component of power relations (Featherstone 2016). On the other hand, for their inattentiveness to other pathways with potential to re-imagine those relations that, although may seem to disregard the materiality of power preferred by these radical geographers, in reality, have much to do with material practice and interaction. For Massey, this is one of the implications when feminist critique is taken seriously (1994, 213). 

Research interest and political engagement took her to many places, especially in America and Europe. From spending time in the Sandinista Nicaragua, to having Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to adopt one of her key concepts (i.e., power geometry) as one of the central tenets of the Bolivarian Revolution (Meegan 2017, 1289), Massey was well-known for supporting counter-hegemonic projects to global capitalism. Such engagements also brought her to Greece and Spain, where she enthusiastically promoted the bottom-up political participation that the leftist movements emerging after the 2008 financial crisis seemed to have made room for. Before that, she had been involved in discussions about gender in post-apartheid South Africa. Notwithstanding all these international encounters, the bulk of Massey’s empirical work and critique were reserved for the UK. Her country of origin, with all its divisions and inequalities, its multiplicity of individual and collective trajectories merging the global and the local against the backdrop of the financialization of the economy, was at the centre of the theoretical and conceptual articulations that Massey sought to put to test and refine. If the most abhorrent contradictions of neoliberal capitalism were to be found somewhere, so as to expose the mechanisms that sustain its dispossessing hegemony, Massey would seem to tell us that we need to start from its ‘core’, to then unpack the spatiality constitutive of all the resulting relations. Relations that are filled with power. 

Key Argument(s)

I am inclined to think the best way of grasping Massey’s contribution is starting from its culmination, arguably encapsulated in the book For Space (2005). Contrary to what the title may suggest, the monograph’s aim is not to make the case for the advantages of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences that scholars had been insisting on for years before her. Massey’s thinking breaks away from binary oppositions. Space is not more important than time, or vice versa. Both space and time are equally important for different reasons; they both are integral for the possibility of existence of society and politics, and crucially, they are implicated in each other. This relational and processual understanding of reality is key for her arguments vindicating a similar notion of space, an approach to research that focuses on connections rather than discrete units and categories, and the need for a progressive politics of responsibility. 

“Space is the product of interrelations” (Massey 2005, 9) is one of the opening statements that challenges conventional assumptions about power and identity and unlocks the spatial as a necessary condition for multiplicity and change. In this relational thinking, identities (whether of states, communities, or individuals) and their interactions create space, while the spatial configurations that exist at a given time and place shape those identities. As relations are generally traversed with power asymmetries, economic unevenness, and/or cultural difference, the resulting ways in which agents imagine (and experience) their position in space and the ensuing struggles for dominance and resistance condition their identity and how politics operate. But Massey’s space is not self-replicating, rather it is in constant flux. Since practices and relations are always under construction and open to change, so is space; and since space is the parameter that enables the existence of multiple identities/entities with their own -yet interrelated- temporal trajectories, it is the necessary dimension for the existence of relations, and thus of politics. This radical re-thinking of space has profound implications for the ways we think about modernity, the nation, or the concept of place. Instead of associating these terms to bounded spaces or processes of territorialisation that create ‘authentic’ identities, enclosed cultures, and separate societies (i.e., the pre-conditions for the ‘us vs. them’ imagination), Massey forces us to acknowledge their multiplicities, fractures and dynamism (2005, 64). 

Such discontinuous, heterogenous, and open-ended approach to space is best illustrated in her defence of  “a global sense of place” (Massey 1994). Places contain multiple identities and fluid boundaries that are open to contestation. We tend to give fixity and clear boundaries to place, but these are futile attempts to stabilise the ever-changing co-constitution between space and time. Places are, indeed, specific as a result of unique social relations. However, relations are dynamic and, more importantly, stretch beyond interactions ‘internal’ to that place. This is why, for Massey, the contemporary dilemma is not between endorsing a process of globalisation that allegedly erodes modern conceptions of space or retreating to localisms and nationalisms that reject ‘foreign’ influence. Places have never been completely isolated from one another; hence the real challenge is how to turn those relations more equal and inclusive. Her widely used concept of ‘power-geometry’ depicts the positions of privilege and subordination that agents, whether individual or collective, take in uneven spatial orders. In line with her consistent call for relationality, Massey uncovers how structural conditions (e.g., unequal distribution of resources) is not the only factor that constrains human agency, but the active spatial practices (i.e., how the powerful organise space, use it, move across it) of those in positions of dominance are equally important. 

In Application

The ample range of topics and the manifold scales and directionalities found in Massey’s treatment of space have elicited some interest across disciplinary fields studying the Middle East. Sometimes adopting the more encompassing aspects of her relational theory, while others resorting to specific arguments and observations to single out issues around gender, the body, or the city, the scholarship on the Middle East shows a degree of variability in its theoretical engagement with Massey’s work. This leaves great scope for integrating her more ground-breaking theoretical contributions into research avenues that have kept Middle East scholars busy for quite some time -and potentially into new ones. 

Urban planning, urbanisation, and the rise of ‘global cities’ in the region has led a number of scholars to use Massey’s insights concerned with the relationship between neoliberal strategies, identity and the urban space. Examples of transformative projects in Dubai (Barnes 2013) or Casablanca (Bogaert 2015) put to test the interplay between modernity and tradition and reveal the processes of accumulation and dispossession associated with particular practices in producing the city. Following Massey, these authors introduce much needed nuance to the misconception of globalisation as an unstoppable force while assigning weight to local strategies in urbanising projects, which, in turn, stimulates debates over responsibility (Kahn 2012, 26). Another spatial scale where Massey has been instrumental is the body (Brister 2014; Hasso and Salime 2016). Gendered bodies become sites of meaning for normative conceptions of social mobility, economic opportunity, and political order. Massey found clear associations between the global as the site of activity, movement, and masculinity; whereas the local as signifying ideas of passivity, immobility, and femininity. Others have noted how power-geometries of mobility and immobility are transposed into wider scales, from the body to the region (El-Hibri 2017). 

Attempts to integrate relations and interactions within and across levels of analysis have benefited from engagements with the ‘global sense of place’ in studies of protests and activism (Gregory 2013), or from Massey’s ideas of scalar nesting in processes of space-making (Ferabolli 2021). Due to the interconnected and transversal nature of a good deal of Middle East politics, where “the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny” (Massey 2005, 9) coalesce in complex ways to shape processes imbued with power, identity and order, relational and open-ended understandings of space are long overdue. Mabon’s forthcoming book (2023) is a good example of this, where Massey’s approach to the spatial is used to study the interplay between domestic and regional politics through the Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Massey also figures prominently in my own work. Her ways of thinking about space, relations, identity, and place are proving to be instructive in my exploration of interlocking securitisation processes around the Muslim Brotherhood in the region. 

Conclusion

Doreen Massey persevered in ensuring her academic work and political activism supported each other towards the kind of changes she wanted to see in the world. She convincingly re-imagined space in order to re-centre it as a collective enterprise, eliciting reflection on our own practices and awareness of how we relate to others. The study of the Middle East can gain much from Massey’s dynamic and multiple space, whether to examine processes that advance inclusiveness, plurality and participation in space, or those that try to negate it. 

References

-American Association of Geographers. 2016. Doreen Massey: 1994-2016. https://www.aag.org/memorial/doreen-massey/. 

-Barnes, James. 2013. “‘Bedouin’ hospitality in the neo-global city of Dubai.” E-International Relations, October 16, 2013. https://www.e-ir.info/2013/10/16/bedouin-hospitality-in-the-neo-global-city-of-dubai/. 

-Bogaert, Koenraad. 2015. “Paradigms lost in Morocco: how urban mega-projects should disturb our understanding of Arab politics.” Jadaliyya, June 4, 2015. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32156. 

-Brister, Rose. 2014. “Placing women’s bodies in Eran Riklis’s The Syrian Bride.” Signs, 39, no. 4: 927-948. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/675578. 

-El-Hibri, Hatim. 2017. “Media studies, the spatial turn, and the Middle East.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 10: 24-48. DOI: 10.1163/18739865-01001003

-Ferabolli, Silvia. 2021. “Space making in the Global South: lessons from the GCC-Mercosur agreement.” Contexto Internacional, 43: 9-31. http://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-8529.2019430100001. 

-Featherstone, David. 2016. “Doreen Massey obituary.” The Guardian, March 217, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/27/doreen-massey-obituary. 

-Gregory, Derek. 2013. “Tahrir: politics, publics and performances of space.” Middle East Critique, 22, no. 3: 235-246. DOI: 10.1080/19436149.2013.814944. 

-Hasso, Frances. and Salime, Zakia. 2016. “Introduction.” In Freedom without permission: bodies and space in the Arab revolutions, edited by Frances Hasso and Zakia Salame, 1-24. Durham: Duke University Press. 

-Kahn, Hilary. 2012. “Seeing beyond nests of meaning: extending our sense of responsibility.” In Building a shared future: religion, politics and public sphere, edited by the British Council and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies, 26-27. https://www.cis.cam.ac.uk/publications/building-a-shared-future-religion-politics-and-the-public-sphere/. 

-Mabon, Simon. 2023. The struggle for supremacy in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

-Massey, Doreen. 2001. Space, Place and Gender. Third edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

-Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. 

-Meegan, Richard. 2017. “Doreen Massey (1944-2016): a geographer who really mattered.” Regional Studies, 51, no. 9: 1285-1296. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2017.1329434. 

Further readings

-Massey, Doreen. 2013. World City. Cambridge: Polity.

-Massey, Doreen. 1995: Spatial division of labour: social structures and the geography of production. 2^nd edition. London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

-Massey, Doreen. 1991. High-tech fantasies: science parks in society, science and space. Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Ltd. 

-Massey, Doreen. And Meegan, Richard. 1985. (eds.). Politics and method: contrasting studies in industrial geography. Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis Ltd.