Is the World Really Shrinking?

On the 9th of November Geography Professor Doreen Massey took part in the BBC Radio 3 festival of Free Thinking. In this lecture she argues:

• Distance hasn't been abolished - it's simply been crumpled and distorted.
• Even then geography is about more than distance; it's about the existence of simultaneous variety - of peoples, places, and cultures.
• The cultural gaps, the social distances, the gulfs in understandings of the world, despite everything, remain strong. And increasing inequality ensures this is so.
• The very argument that we should all become the same is a vision provoking its precise opposite - the reassertion of local specificity.
• In fact, we persistently evade the starkness of these differences. Imagining other cultures as stuck at the back of a historical queue - 'developing' countries waiting to become 'developed', for instance, diminishes their actually-existing difference now.

This is a superb lecture that clearly outlines the importance of Geography in understanding our world and promoting the subject in the process. Well done Doreen! Listen again here.