Doreen Massey

Doreen Barbara Massey (3 January 1944 – 11 March 2016) was a British social scientist and geographer. She specialized in Marxist geography, feminist geography, and cultural geography, as well as other topics. She was Professor of Geography at the Open University.

She became a Labour member of the Lords in November 1999.

Her involvement in support groups during the 1984-85 miners’ strike shaped her appreciation of the way gender, sexuality and race could reconfigure understandings of class. Discussions in the early 80s with her friends Stuart Hall, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau informed the inventive political analysis associated with Marxism Today. In 1995 she co-founded the journal Soundings with Hall and Michael Rustin to develop this open left intellectual position.

When Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, Massey wrote an editorial for Soundings entitled Exhilarating Times in which she discerned the “potential fracturing of the ideological and political hegemony of neoliberalism”. She yearned for this opening up of political space, and devoted much intellectual energy through the Kilburn Manifesto, which she co-edited with Hall and Rustin, to challenging the neoliberal consensus; work that will continue through Soundings and many other projects in which she was involved.

Affiliations

• Honorary Associate National Secular Society
• Kilburn Manifesto
• Family Planning Association from 1989 to 1994.
• All-Party Parliamentary Group for Integrated and Complementary Healthcare.
• All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group.
• One Law For All

Resources

• David Featherstone, "Doreen Massey obituary", The Guardian, 27 March 2016.