15 Feb 2011 5:15pm - 7:00pm CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

Description

Professor Doreen Massey  (Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University)
 

In Venezuela, as part of the Bolivarian revolution, there has been much experimentation with extending grassroots democracy and combatting political exclusion. This lecture will explore one of these experiments – communal councils – in which the author's concept of 'power geometries' has been put to active political use.
The lecture will raise both political and theoretical issues, and also raise questions about an academic's 'responsibility' for the political use of their concepts. The city focus will be on Caracas. 

Doreen Massey is Professor in the Department of Geography at the Open University. Her research over many years has focused on space and place, and throughout her career she has also engaged actively in the world beyond the academy. She is co-founder and co-editor of Soundings: a journal of politics and culture, and presents and writes regularly in mainstream media on issues relating to globalisation, cities, regional inequality, and, in general, the significance of geography and of space and place in the currently globalised world. Since 2007 she has also been working in Venezuela, where her concept of power-geometry has been adopted as a means of thinking through the programme of decentralisation and equalisation of political power. In particular this involves affording the possibility of giving a meaningful political voice to both poorer regions and the previously excluded within the cities.

 

Open to all.  No registration required. Part of the City Seminar series.
For more information about the group, please visit the link on the right hand side of this page.  

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