Editorial: Spaces of resistance

We went to press the day after the referendum, which gave us little time for thinking about a response. This will be something we address in the next issue. In the mean time we hope that some of the articles in this issue offer ideas that can help us in the difficult days ahead.

This issue was already very hard for us to put together, as we are still coming to terms with the loss of Doreen Massey. Doreen was one of the three founding editors of Soundings, and it is difficult to imagine a future in which her comments, suggestions and strategic interventions will not be part of the daily life of our journal. Her interventions ranged from major theoretical projects such as the conceptualisation and commissioning of the Kilburn Manifesto to extremely detailed points about split infinitives or the mysteries of punctuation.

Doreen’s brilliance in exploring the connections between space, place and politics would have been invaluable in the post-referendum discussion, in which it is clear that regional inequality within Britain played a major part. In Dave Featherstone’s article - which was initially a joint project with Doreen, and reflects on the insights that geography can bring to bear on discussions of hegemony - he shows how Doreen was able to make a very specific contribution to discussions about the politics of a given moment (the conjuncture) through her insistence on including the specificities of place into the many overlapping levels that constitute a political moment. As he comments, this can be seen in her work on London, in which she drew attention to its role as a city in shaping the emergence of neoliberalism, or her work on de-industrialisation, which showed how unequal regional development is driven by specific interest groups - as seen in the strikingly different kind of help offered by successive governments to the bankers of the City as compared with the steel workers of the de-industrialised regions.

As well as Dave’s article, which pays tribute to Doreen through an engagement with her ideas in the working out of a specific argument, we also have in this issue an appreciation of Doreen’s work from Joe Painter, and an article by Marina Prentoulis on left populism in Europe, which was also planned as a joint article with Doreen. Joe outlines how Doreen’s ideas affected theory in geography more widely as well as left theory, and is a fitting tribute to her wide influence. But in some ways the articles by Marina and Dave are the best way of honouring her work, since they do what Doreen would have wanted most: they carry on discussions begun with her. This is something we plan to do as a journal for the foreseeable future.

Both Dave Featherstone and Joe Painter point to the ways in which Doreen’s academic and intellectual work was inseparable from her political preoccupations. As Dave writes, her interventions were never concerned with thinking about geography as an academic exercise. Her aim was to understand ‘the ways in which struggles over geography were integral to the making of particular kinds of political strategies and identities’. And she saw thinking geographically as providing ‘indispensable tools for thinking about politics’. In this she was an exemplary left intellectual. Her theorising was always connected to wider concerns. And she also always made the effort to be accessible. As Ben Little wrote in the tribute we included at the last minute in issue 62, she made complex ideas accessible and made transparent the ‘murk of ideology in our culture’.¹ Joe Painter also draws attention to this aspect of Doreen as a teacher, in describing how she helped him to understand the importance of Althusser’s conception of over-determination - not as dry theory but as a way into thinking about multiple possibilities, and ‘how the world could be otherwise’. It was for these qualities that Doreen was loved by her students and by many other young people. As well as her clarity, they appreciated the generosity of her approach - she really did want everyone to join in the debate, and she loved attending meetings large...