Massey 2002: Globalidsation: what does it mean for geography?
Governments in the UK and USA tell us that globalisation is inevitable, the only possible future, telling us some countries are just behind and that eventually they will follow along the path which we have led. Globalisation is not a force of nature, its a product of society, a political and economic project requiring the efforts of the WTO, IMF, USA, multinational corporations, World Bank to push it forward
What it actually is a denial of difference because countries like Mozambique are behind us in development, turning geography into history, space into time. Implication is that there is only one history, we are all just at different stages in it, not to imagine these countries having their own trajectories, their own particular histories and potential for their own futures. Clinton's is a failure of geographical imagination.
The term free in free trade implies something good, to be aimed at, this is a geographical imagination of a world without borders. Yet a debate on international migration and the same people, another geographical imagination in total contradiction, the imagination of a defensible place, a world divided by difference and the smack of firm boundaries, a geographical imagination of nationalism's. No matter they contradict each other because it works
Geography's intellectual contribution
It ranges so widely through the social, cultural and the economic, through human and physical geography. Geography is more than general knowledge (a broad awareness of the world), has its own distinctive intellectual contribution to make to an understanding of the world
Understanding place
We have reworked one of our central concepts: place, we don't think of place or region or nation as simply bounded territories with eternal, essential characteristics, rather we now stress the understanding of place as the product of its relations with elsewhere, setting it in context with the relations with the world beyond, different stories coming together and becoming entangled. The thrown-togetherness of physical proximity. 'A global sense of place', it implies places are internally complicated, not simply coherent communities, places need to be negotiated
Number of geographers using work on place to get some messages across- firs there is no unproblematic place based local community, places as one of the arenas where people learn to negotiate with others, called society. Practice of daily negotiation, recognition of the internal complexity of place
Global place/local place
John Berger- its space rather than time that hides consequences from us.
If place really is a meeting place then 'the lived reality of our daily lives' is far from being localised - in its connections, its sources and resources, and in its repercussions, that 'daily life' spreads much wider
is not that local places are not grounded, real, etc., but that global spaces are
sense 'the global' is just as 'real' and 'grounded', even just as 'everyday', as is the so-called local place
There is a kind of accepted understanding that we care first for and have our first responsibilities towards those nearest in. Yet in an age of globalisation, and in the light of the way of imagining space and place that I have been talking about, could we not open up that set of nested boxes? Could we not consider a different geography of care an responsibility? We might think of it as an ethics, a politics, of connectivity rather than of nested territories. Specifically we could open up a bit more the question of (the possibility of) responsibility and care at a distance
Imagined Geography
The whole planet is implicated in the daily lives of each of us, there is the still remaining impact in the world said to be increasingly virtual of material physical, proximity (place). There are daily rhetoric's of territory though which we are daily urged to construct our maps and loyalty
But there are also those notions of the local as more real than the global, of place as more real than space
Robinson 1996- argues to think about duties and responsibilities we have to imagine the world in terms of social relations, arguing abstract appeals to a shared humanity will not be an adequate motivation, what is needed is a practical understanding of the relations which connect us. Should we not take responsibility for the geographical as well as the historical relations that make us what we are. Widely agreed that crucial both to the recognition of the challenge and to the motivation to take it up is the nature and capacity of our imaginations
the specifically geographical aspect of that 'imaginative power' - in its potential richness and also in its intellectual rigour - is absolutely central to such progress. If, as John Berger argues, it is space that currently hides things from us then it is part of our responsibility and our contribution as teachers of geography to expand both our knowledge and our imaginations to make that less the case.