Doreen Massey, former Emeritus Professor of Geography at the Open University and famed author of such monographs as Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984), Space, Place, and Gender (1994) and For Space (2005), passed away in March, 2016. Here, Tracey Skelton offers some reflections in memoriam.
I first encountered Doreen Massey through her work as a feminist. For my PhD on gender power relations in the Caribbean in the 1980s and early 1990s, I was reading and absorbing any geographical work I could find with a feminist approach. I was inspired by ‘A Woman’s Place’, the piece she co-authored with Linda McDowell in Geography Matters! A Reader. The key principles of the piece remain with me to this day. Differential economic development and concomitant employment practices across a region or a nation impact on and are impacted by gender. Combined, they create the conditions for different formations of male dominance. As I consider employment practices in Singapore (both for Singaporeans and the million plus foreign workers) in my own work, this 1984 essay—with its insights into gender and spatial inequalities within workplaces and employment structures—continues to make profound sense.
Later, in my first lectureship at Nottingham Trent University, Doreen’s work saved me as I was tasked to teach a Bachelor’s of Education module on social and economic geography. The social I could cover; the economic geography, however, was new territory. I read her co-edited book, The Economy in Question, and was amazed I could understand all of it. It was also rewardingly political and allowed me to make sense of, and heavily critique, Thatcherism and related economic practices such as restructuring. What I had known instinctively through living in the UK was presented and analysed in a way that put all the pieces together—the economic, the social, and the political. I was able to translate her economic geography to my students with enthusiasm and personal insights. We were learning together and really understanding how an economy works (or doesn’t) for different groups of people. I continued to read other works by Doreen and was always struck by her clarity of writing and determination to integrate the political. The politics of critique and social justice were and remain important in my research and writing; in Doreen, I had discovered a mentor and kindred spirit.
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