Event overview
A conversation revisiting Doreen Massey's influential essay with Yasmin Gunaratnam, Suzanne Hall and Agata Lisiak
This event revisits geographer Doreen Massey’s influential essay ‘A global sense of place’ (1991) which used the example of Kilburn High Road, London, to question top-down ideas of globalisation. For Massey, Kilburn - and any other place - is never just one thing, but rather, ‘a meeting place of jostling, potentially conflicting trajectories’. As she wrote, "it is (or ought to be) impossible even to begin thinking about Kilburn High Road without bringing into play half the world, and a considerable amount of British imperialist history". And that, as she insisted, provokes in us a global sense of place. Massey thought of globalisation as a project, not a historical inevitability. And she saw cities such as London as engines of this project.
In the spirit of Massey’s many intellectual collaborations we bring together Suzanne Hall (LSE), Yasmin Gunaratnam (KCL), and Agata Lisiak (BCB & Spatial Delight) in conversation, to examine how London’s imperialist and colonialist legacies are evident not only on the city’s streets, but also reach behind closed doors: into our classrooms, living rooms, shops, and hospital wards. We consider the relevance of the essay for understanding the role of the wider geographies of interdependence in the making of the life of the street.
The discussion will draw on the themes we addressed in Episode 3 of the podcast Spatial Delight, so we recommend that the audience listens to it before the event.
Yasmin Gunaratnam is Professor of Social Justice at King’s College London. Previously she was Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research. She has been working on issues of race and gender equality in health and social care for the past twenty years. Professor Gunaratnam is a poet and has published eight books, including A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger (2016) and Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care (2013).
Suzanne Hall is an interdisciplinary urban scholar and has practised as an architect in South Africa. She is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the LSE. Her work engages with the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation, focusing on racialised frameworks of citizenship and inequality and their everyday contestations. Her recent book is The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain.
Agata Lisiak is Associate Professor of Migration Studies at Bard College Berlin and a leader of Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, a collaborative project funded by the Open Society University Network. She works at the intersection of migration research, sociology and cultural studies. Dr Lisiak has written about migrant motherhood, urban girlhood, walking in the city, and Rosa Luxemburg as an urban thinker.
The event is hosted by Emma Jackson, Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR).
Image by Bose Sarmiento.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Feb 2023 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm |
Accessibility
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