Inheritances

Rachel Magnusson 

Warren Magnusson with his daughter Rachel in 1983. Photo: Sharon Walls. 

Like most teenagers, I wanted to be nothing like either of my parents. My life was going to be much more adventurous, creative and engaged. Besides, it was ludicrous to assume I could aspire to be anything like my father, who went to University at sixteen, studied at Oxford, and could nonchalantly provide names, dates and detailed historical context on any possible topic at the kitchen table. No, I was going to be my own person. 

Now, in my mid-40s, it is easy to see that I wasn’t successful at escaping his influence. I set out to study literature and theatre and then found myself studying political theory. I thought I might be a high school teacher and then found myself running citizens’ assemblies. I dreamed of living in a cabin in the woods and then found myself living in cities, eventually working for the City of Vancouver to design and manage spaces for public life. Turns out I was Warren’s daughter after all. 

Of course, these markers of influence – political theory, democracy, cities – are a bit of a distraction, a decoy. They suggest that Warren and I simply shared the same interests. I don’t think we did, really. Instead, I think what I inherited from my dad were some core assumptions about the world and people that led me, in a roundabout way, to shared places and terrains.  

When I consider this, I see two basic tenets that guided him as a person and a thinker: people are capable and be humble because the world is complex. The second of these tenets was the most obvious to me growing up, and likely also the most obvious to his students in the classroom. He would let me speak with assurance and make a righteous argument about how things ought to be. He would give my declarations space, letting me revel in my brilliance and certainty. And then, gently, he’d ask a question. Something simple. I’d find, somehow, the definite picture I’d painted begin to loosen, swirl. Maybe I’d made it too easy. He didn’t offer an answer or a way out, instead he’d hold the unraveling picture with me: it had just become interesting. The complexity didn’t scare him, it drew him. He wanted to hold it with you and marvel. Wasn’t the world an interesting place? Don’t be angry that you don’t know; relish it. 

The first tenet, however, wasn’t so directly expressed. Likely because he would have been too embarrassed to assert such a simplistic belief. Nevertheless, this belief, this hope is so clearly at the root of all his thinking. As he states in the first sentence of his final book reflecting on his academic career: “This book is haunted by an old idea: the thought that people could actually come together in their own communities and decide for themselves how things ought to be” (Magnusson 2015, p. 3). It is this idea of the capacity of people and how it gets perpetually set aside and ignored in our political thinking that led to his study of local democracy and social movements, his critiques of the state and sovereignty, his arguments about seeing like a city. There is nothing simplistic in these journeys of thought – he details the complexity with care and appreciation – but there is a simple belief motivating his efforts. And this belief, this fundamental generosity towards others, quietly grounded not only his academic work but also his relationships with colleagues, students, friends. 

Now that I am older, and now that Warren’s gone, I hope to try to hold these inheritances more consciously and more deeply. They are not assumptions one can possibly live out all the time – a neat and pithy answer is thrilling, and, god, can people ever be dumb and disappointing! And yet. And yet, what I want for most in my years ahead is to come back to and practice these inheritances from my dad and their profound wisdom, their profound challenge. 

References 

Magnusson, Warren. 2015. Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 

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Dr. Rachel Magnusson is the Associate Director of Street Activities at the City of Vancouver and is Warren's daughter. 

Warren Magnusson: Pedagog and Activist

William K. Carroll (University of Victoria) 

Warren Magnusson was a brilliant political theorist, but as he noted in The Search for Political Space (1996, p. vii), “I like to think that my empirical work has grounded my theoretical reflections, and vice versa.” Indeed, Warren’s astute studies of municipal radicalism informed, and were informed by, his deep critiques of state-centric political thought. Yet in the 1980s, when neoliberalism began to be implemented across the advanced capitalist world, Warren went beyond the academic dialectic of empirical work and theoretical reflection to lead two important political initiatives, centered at the University of Victoria (UVic), but with wider ramifications. Both forays into praxis led Warren on a path toward some of his major theoretical contributions, as presented in The Search for Political Space.  

The first of these originated in a local political crisis in 1983, provoked by the “restraint program” that British Columbia’s Social Credit government introduced in May of that year. Inspired by Thatcherism, the program was the first full-fledged neoliberal assault on human rights and social welfare in Canada. By the closing weeks of 1983, in the aftermath of an escalating political strike and multi-sectoral protest movement – the Solidarity Coalition – academics at UVic were ready to push back. It was Warren who stepped forward, convening a group that became the Committee on Alternatives for British Columbia – CABC.  

Under his leadership the CABC produced two books that critiqued neoliberalism and offered alternatives with contributions mainly from UVic academics. As a member of the CABC steering committee and co-editor of the first book, The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia, I experienced Warren’s democratic style of leadership directly. He inspired the team of 20 contributors to produce highly accessible, public-facing analyses. The book focused on the specificities of British Columbia yet placed them in the context of global developments, emphasizing in its Conclusion (which Warren penned most of) that “local as well as global developments give rise to opportunities for political action” (Magnusson et al. 1984, p. 277). Released only months after the political strike of 1983, The New Reality quickly became a BC bestseller, providing resources to critical social movements and publics in the ongoing fight-back. Two years later, the CABC published a second book, After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia, which again mobilized a network of progressive academics, this time to explore the possibility of creating “an authentically democratic society” in which British Columbians could take control of their communities and working lives (Magnusson et al. 1986, p. 14).  

Under Warren’s leadership, the CABC continued to create new political spaces into the late 1980s: for instance, through a series of public forums on “The Politics of Empowerment” in 1987 and 1988. Nearly a decade on, he reflected on a key lesson from his CABC activism: that civic progressives, urban radicals, and local socialists were all searching for political space in the contemporary crisis of social democracy. “…What I sensed in the 1980s was that many radicals had been driven – sometimes against their better judgment – to explore the political space offered by urban politics and municipal government, in the hope that this would connect them with a wider political base and give them a place within the state to contest the logic of contemporary capitalism” (Magnusson 1996, p. 21).  

As other progressive think tanks emerged, the CABC fell dormant, but the network that had developed within UVic served as a basis for the second important initiative. In 1987, Warren led the complex process that begat an interdisciplinary graduate program in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (CSPT) which, amid various academic orthodoxies, opened political space to critical theory in the social sciences and humanities. Warren directed the program from its inception in 1988 to 1994, when I served a term as director. In these years, the program expanded from its three initial participating departments (Political Science, Philosophy and Sociology) to include English and History (and rebranded itself as Cultural, Political, and Social Thought). Warren and I co-taught the first CSPT 500 course, in the fall of 1988, during which I came to appreciate his Socratic pedagogy, which offered more questions than answers, inspiring a keen group of students to engage critically with a wide range of theoretical perspectives. CSPT was designed as an interdisciplinary critical theory program that could be taken up within discipline-specific graduate programs. This model, Warren’s brainchild, has been effective in building and maintaining a progressive community on campus around critical theoretical perspectives, with alumni numbering in the hundreds and nine academic units currently participating.  

Warren Magnusson went on, in succeeding decades, to make signal theoretical contributions, and he is rightly renowned as a path-breaking political theorist of urban modernity. But the instances I have recalled invite us to recognize his practical contributions in creating more space for critical thought and action. He combined theory and practice in creative and impactful ways, interrogating the prospects for and facilitating the expansion of the spaces from which change can emanate, within academe and well beyond it. 

References 

Magnusson, Warren, William K. Carroll, Charles Doyle, Monika Langer, and R.B.J. Walker, eds.  1984. The New Reality: The Politics of Restraint in British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books.  

Magnusson, Warren, Charles Doyle, R.B.J. Walker, and John DeMarco, eds. 1986. After Bennett: A New Politics for British Columbia. Vancouver: New Star Books. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

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William K. Carroll is a Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria.

Radical Democratic Possibilities of the City

 Engin Isin (Queen Mary University of London) 

When I learned of Warren’s passing, my initial reaction was to write, “Warren has been a very special person and scholar to me since I began writing almost forty years ago. Our paths crossed many times, and I learned so much from him not only about scholarly writing but also about acting ethically and politically. That was his greatest gift to me. I have always been so grateful for his support and presence.” Later, I realised that the tense in which I reflected on Warren was present perfect, not past. This wasn’t only because I was deeply saddened, but because Warren has always been a strong presence as a mentor, and he will remain so. 

Warren’s work published in the 1980s was revelatory when I was writing my doctoral thesis on the longue durée history of the Canadian city (Isin 1990). He had published on postwar metropolitan reform movements from a post-Marxist perspective on the capitalist city (Magnusson 1981), on the local-state in Canada (1985a), on the political economy of the local-state (Magnusson 1985b), and a critique of histories of local government (Magnusson 1986). The central argument of this work was that the local-state or local government could not be simply derived from the theories of the state, and that the city has a distinct logic that requires historical and theoretical analysis. Having conducted these analyses, Warren’s conclusion was startlingly simple yet powerful: the state needs to be retheorised as a distributed and decentralised organisation of power and capital, in which the city plays a crucial and antagonistic role. Warren provided a brilliant account of the historical development of municipal government in Canada (Magnusson 1983a) and used it to provide an equally brilliant analysis of the city of Toronto (Magnusson 1983b). I cannot claim that a newly arrived émigré in his mid-20s struggling with English could thoroughly understand the nuances and subtleties of this body of work, but it certainly left an indelible mark on my intellectual trajectory on the city and its radical democratic possibilities.  

Shortly after finishing my thesis, we met either in Montreal (1992) or Vancouver (1993) during a conference. I didn’t realise he was in the audience when he introduced himself after my talk, but as our conversation progressed, I realised he was a special person. He was generous, inquisitive, and interested in my views on the long history of the Canadian city, stretching back to the twelfth century Europe, as a history of the present. I would later regard him as a mentor. 

Our next encounter was probably in Berlin (1995) when we both gave papers in a conference. By then, I had published my thesis as a book (1992). Warren was once again so generous and critical. We had conversations about the long history of the Canadian city, spanning from colonial to imperial and state organisations of power and capital. His insightful comments on the emergence of the “citizen” category between the thesis and the book were pivotal in shaping my subsequent work on the city as a space of citizenship. He was working on his great book The Search for Political Space (Magnusson 1996), and I had the privilege of hearing how he had developed his earlier historical and theoretical ideas about the city into a concept of political space.  

Warren’s book made a significant contribution to my understanding of the state and city, and their relations, through a political space perspective. He articulated political space as an object of analysis, challenging the notion that cities, states, and empires are stable entities. Instead, he saw them as formations of power and capital. This approach was incredibly generative, refreshingly post-disciplinary, and politically radical. For instance, his critique of the concept of the global city was formidable because it reified rather than revealed the political conditions that made it possible (Magnusson 2000). 

In 1998, Warren visited York University, where I was teaching, for a conference and summer school. The intellectual excitement was immense about his work on politicizing space and the idea of the city, and it was a memorable experience for all participants.  

When Warren published an edited collection with Karena Shaw on the struggles of indigenous peoples in Clayoquot Sound (Magnusson and Shaw 2002), his concept of political space as a concentration and condensation of relations of power and capital traversing diverse forms and scales demonstrated the intellectual and political force of his work over the past twenty years. 

Warren often revisited his earlier concerns and concepts by engaging current political debates. He questioned whether municipalities are creatures of provinces (Magnusson 2005b), whether we need to protect the rights of local self-government (Magnusson 2005a), and recognised the place of local government in urbanism (Magnusson 2005c). This reworking introduced him to a new generation of scholars and activists engaged in new politics of cities in the twenty-first century.  

Warren distilled all his experience and knowledge of almost thirty years in Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011), where he developed a succinct statement on the city as a space of struggle over democratic possibilities. He evoked latent concerns about democratic possibilities of the city beyond local government, as a crucial political space. As Roger Keil observes in Brunet-Jailly et al. (2013, 794), Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City was anticipated as a sequel to The Search for Political Space (1996) in two significant ways: “… it steps far outside the canon of political urbanism; and it becomes a more urgent, almost corrosive force applied onto the political narratives we have been telling ourselves, in the discipline but also in the practice of politics, about what it actually is that we do.” These two books both encapsulate and rework Warren’s political theory of the city, providing new interpretations of his earlier research and anticipating or provoking further research. 

Warren continued to return to his earlier research, reinterpreting and reworking it for a new generation and addressing new problems. He rearticulated the internal relation between politics and the city (Magnusson 2014), seeing the city beyond critical urban studies, how to rethink the city as an object of international political sociology (Magnusson 2015), and radical democratic possibilities of the city (Magnusson 2021) as a right to local self-government (Magnusson 2023). Warren’s continued invitation to think about the city as a transversal political space with radical democratic possibilities has been a beacon for my research, writing, and teaching. We kept crossing paths in both online and offline events, and I was always inspired by his thoughts on the current radical political possibilities.   

Over forty years since I read his work, Warren continues to inspire my own writing and research. He remains the same person to me: generous but critical, stimulating yet questioning, always inviting me to think through problems as they arise by keeping an eye on political space as the space where political forms appear and radical democratic possibilities of political life unfold.  

References 

Brunet‐Jailly, Emmanuel, Serena Kataoka, Roger Keil, Andrew Sancton, and Zack Taylor. 2013. ‘Commentary on Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City by Warren Magnusson’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (2): 790–803. 

Isin, Engin. 1990. ‘The Birth of the Modern City in British North America’. PhD Thesis, Toronto: University of Toronto. 

Isin, Engin. 1992. Cities Without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation. Montreal: Black Rose Books. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1981. ‘Metropolitan Reform in the Capitalist City’. Canadian Journal of Political Science 14 (September): 557–77. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1983a. ‘Introduction: The Development of Canadian Urban Government’. In City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, 1–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1983b. ‘Toronto’. In City Politics in Canada, edited by Warren Magnusson and Andrew Sancton, 94–139. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1985a. ‘The Local State in Canada: Theoretical Perspectives’. Canadian Public Administration / Administration Publique Du Canada 28 (4): 575–99. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1985b. ‘Political Science, Political Economy, and the Local State’. Urban History Review 14 (1): 47–53. 

Magnusson, Warren. 1986. ‘Bourgeois Theories of Local Government’. Political Studies 34: 1–18. Magnusson, Warren. 1996. The Search for Political Space: Globalization, Social Movements, and the Urban Political Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2000. ‘Politicizing the Global City’. In Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City, edited by Engin Isin, 289–306. Innis Centenary Series. London: Routledge. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2005a. ‘Protecting the Right of Local Self-Government’. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 38 (4): 897–922. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2005b. ‘Are Municipalities Creatures of the Provinces?’ Journal of Canadian Studies 39 (2): 5–30. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2005c. ‘Urbanism, Cities and Local Self-Government’. Canadian Public Administration/Administration Publique Du Canada 48 (1): 96–123. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2011. Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. Interventions. London: Routledge. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2014. ‘The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1561–75. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2015. ‘Bringing Politics Back In’. International Political Sociology 9 (1): 91–93. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2021. ‘From the Spectacular to the Mundane: Radical Democracy in the Open City’. Identities 29 (1): 63–79. 

Magnusson, Warren. 2023. ‘The Right to Local Self-Government’. In Handbook on Local and Regional Governance, edited by Filipe Teles, 39–48. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 

Magnusson, Warren, and Karena. Shaw. 2003. A Political Space: Reading the Global Through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 

Marcuse, Peter, David Imbroscio, Simon Parker, Jonathan S. Davies, and Warren Magnusson. 2014. ‘Critical Urban Theory versus Critical Urban Studies: A Review Debate’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (5): 1904–17. 

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Engin Isin is Professor Emeritus of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London. 

Thinking Alongside, Provoking Transformation

Karena Shaw (University of Victoria) 

I had the good fortune to meet Warren Magnusson at an uncertain time in my career. I was laboring away on a dissertation that was making me question whether I really was a political theorist, or wanted to be. I was engrossed in the grassroots social-ecological politics unfolding in Clayoquot Sound, but my education in politics offered me vanishingly little to contribute there – a humbling realization that deepened my uncertainty about career trajectories. I loved teaching, but it looked unlikely to lead to a job, let alone tenure.   

Then Warren and I began talking about politics, in particular the politics of Clayoquot Sound. He was so curious, and thoughtful. He asked hard questions, engaged my answers seriously, and pushed me to articulate my observations and analyses as if they actually held potentially valuable insights. He tossed hand grenade queries my way, helping to dislodge my deeply held assumptions about what was, and wasn’t, important about what was happening there, and why. These were some of the most exciting, challenging, and intellectually engaged conversations of my career; they truly changed me.  

There were two aspects of Warren’s approach that altered – and enriched – the trajectory of my work, both of which are deeply embedded in his scholarship. The first was his insistence that the struggles over the future of Clayoquot Sound had to be understood not only as a conflict over forestry, or Indigenous rights and title, or community wellbeing, but also as a site of urban politics. Warren insisted on redrawing the spatial assumptions that located Clayoquot Sound as out-of-the way or marginal, but also – against all the environmentalist framings – as unique and, by virtue of its (perceived) pristine nature, set apart from the mucky political economy of urban life. I protested this mightily, but of course this conceptual jiu-jitsu was essential to understanding what unfolded there, as the needs and desires of cappuccino-drinking urbanites came to reshape the resource extraction economy of and at the margins, while clearcut logging continued apace in other out-of-the-way places. Warren’s ability to appreciate the spectacular “wildness” of the Sound while simultaneously recognizing it as defined in part by its centrality to circuits of urban life opened a crucial conceptual landscape – one yet to be adequately explored. 

The other gift I received from Warren emerged from how he engaged with practitioners. Warren didn’t see the activists and community members I worked alongside in Clayoquot Sound as objects to be studied, or informants, or agents acting within a determining system. He saw them as fellow travellers, engaged in the same intellectual and personal project that motivated him: that of figuring out how power and politics worked, of innovating and stretching the boundaries of how we thought about and acted in the world in the service of advancing collective efforts to make things better. When he engaged with them, he sought to think alongside them, to draw out their understandings of and insights about their strategic choices, and the landscapes that shaped them. And he did so with generosity and rigor, good humor, incisive critique, and no shortage of skepticism.  

This may seem a small thing, but it isn’t. Warren’s writing is infused by his deep respect for those who practice politics, who innovate to create new political spaces amidst at times paralyzing narratives and crushing realities. His skilled questioning would lead activists to articulate nuanced strategic judgements evidencing deep insight into political space and possibility. Their responses and questions would likewise cause him to reflect, reconsider, and at times struggle with his own assumptions. And then the conversations would get really interesting, as they explored together the implications and future trajectories of their work. All would leave challenged, and changed, but also buoyed by the recognition of their fellow travelers.  

The rich insights from these conversations informed Warren’s thinking, offering him the data and insight to challenge conceptual and disciplinary closures that unproductively constrained conventional understandings of politics, especially – but not exclusively – urban politics. His ability to draw out and articulate these landscapes with nuance and precision was extraordinary and offers us an important legacy: an approach to urban politics that holds open questions of how political space is constituted, and invites investigation into how and why this matters.  

My intellectual and personal trajectories were transformed by my collaboration with Warren: he helped me to see how I could be the kind of political thinker I wanted to be, one deeply engaged by and responsive to the practice of politics, by how people – a wide diversity of people – understood their worlds, rejected what was presented to them as inevitable, and collaborated and innovated to open new possibilities, new political spaces. By taking interlocutors seriously and putting them into critical conversation with the rich inherited traditions of political theory, he showed me how to move what felt like a private passion into something real in the world, something that engaged and inspired other people, that held up the work of truly innovative political thinkers and actors, opening it to recognition, to critique, to being a part of the conversation about the past, present and future of politics.  

I know that I am not alone in having my intellectual landscape reshaped by Warren. As a colleague, I observed generations of students gripped by and grappling with the world as Warren saw it. A gifted and committed teacher, he brought theatre into the classroom, not just offering well-crafted lectures but performances designed to provoke, to inspire, to engage. He invited students to take their worlds, themselves, and their intellectual inheritances seriously, by treating them seriously. I have a visceral recollection of walking into a classroom at the conclusion of one of Warren’s lectures, feeling the air vibrating as students paused, savouring the richness of the experience for a moment before carrying on with their lives.  

Warren’s writings – infused as they are with his passion for democratic politics, his appreciation of “everyday” political innovation, and his always-incisive analysis – offer us crucial touchstones to help navigate these fraught times. But the legacy that I find myself appreciating most deeply rests in his ability to craft profound questions, of the kind that shift mental landscapes. Posing these questions required not only having a broad and deep understanding of the intellectual landscapes we have inherited, but the ability to listen deeply to others, to perceive tensions or blockages in their thinking, and to be curious about how they might navigate their way forward. His questions invited deeper engagement in hopes of opening possibilities for thinking and being otherwise.  
These are the kinds of questions we need to be asking and conversations we need to be having in this political moment. Insofar as his work provokes us in this way, I think this is a legacy that Warren would value. I’m so very grateful to him for offering it to us.  

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Karena Shaw is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. She and Warren Magnusson co-edited A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and enjoyed many long conversations about politics and life in the years that followed.  

For Warren: I Wouldn’t be Me Without Him

Delacey Tedesco (Okanagan College) 

This is a hard loss. I first took a class with Warren in 1998 called, if I remember correctly, Hegel and His Discontents. I was a third-year undergraduate student, returning to the University of Victoria after an exchange year at the University of Exeter, a year teaching English in Japan, and a year off recovering from the year teaching English in Japan. I hadn’t been in an upper-level class before, and I hadn’t been in any university setting for a couple years. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever became less terrified of the class, or of Warren, that term. And I remain terrified of Hegel. 

But I realized, as I thought, that actually I would have met Warren and Sharon, and I think Rachel too, in December of 1993 or 1994, as they generously hosted the graduated students in the Politics program for a holiday gathering; I was there as the date of someone doing his MA in the program and working with Warren to read William Morris as a utopian socialist. So, that means that I knew Warren for 30 years, and worked with him closely for 25 years, as he became the supervisor and co-supervisor of my Honours, MA, and PhD projects.   

It was a challenge, in the early years, to overcome the fear I had developed, as he seemed this towering figure, with the all the world’s knowledge at his fingertips… as though when he closed his fingertips together as he spoke, which he did often, he was closing a circuit and allowing the knowledge to flow unimpeded. He pushed hard, and he was demanding, in ways that left me sure that he saw me as very stupid and very lazy and very unsatisfactory. He would seem exasperated and disappointed, and I would become defensive and shut down, which made him exasperated and disappointed.  

Over the early years, we had to work through these stories we had created about each other and find our way to a more honest and more vulnerable place of connection. When I think back on some of those exchanges, I can notice that he was perhaps the only person I was being honest with at the time, which says a lot about how much I was willing to risk to find a way not just to work with him, but to connect with him – to trust him.  

Over the past month, I’ve tried to find ways to reconnect. I have searched for videos that might capture his amazing capacity for telling stories in the classroom, weaving spells on his audience. But nothing can bring back the feeling of being in his presence as he spoke, whether in a full lecture hall or in his living room. I’ve gone back through years and years of emails, seeing everything he gave me laid out chronologically: countless letters of recommendation for countless job applications, many of them totally implausible, yet he never complained; pictures of Rachel with Daniel, sent with such love and pride, as I was getting used to mothering my own twin boys and sending just as many photos with just as much love and pride; and always, that mix of careful reading, insightful analysis, theoretical singularity, generous engagement, and what I came to trust was his absolutely characteristic warmth, under the often dry delivery. 

So I want to celebrate the contributions he has made, not just to me, but to everyone who has engaged with him and his work. And I want to do so in his own words, as he was a consummate storyteller who spoke and wrote with such voice.  

Anyone familiar with Warren likely witnessed his amazing ability to come into a lecture with a few notes on yellow legal notepaper and tell an elaborate story that traced a line of thought or argument through the centuries, as though it were the sole, essential perspective on all those years. The one story that we couldn’t live without. And then the following class, with another brief set of notes, he would do it all over again, only developing a different line of argument or a different concept, a different lineage of texts and authors. Everything came as an inherent story, and in duration of the telling – articulated by his gestures, wrapped in his voice – it was the only story. 

In my one brief experience working with him in a more editorial capacity, on a forum Jen Bagelmen and I co-edited for International Political Sociology (Bagelman and Tedesco 2015; Magnusson 2015), I witnessed first-hand how this approach to thinking through fully-formed stories emerged in his writing. We received a first draft, Jen and I, and offered a range of editorial comments, suggestions, and queries. What we received back was simple:  

IPS Forum (August 2014): 

Jen and Delacey 

I wrote an entirely different version of my contribution, which I have attached here. It may be better or worse. See what you think. 

In other words, the thinking emerges from and through the story. If you tinker with a sentence here or a reference there, you haven’t just changed the story, you’ve changed the thinking itself. I remember him talking about writing for a day, or a week, and feeling that something was not quite saying what he wanted, or telling the story that needed to be told. It wasn’t enough to try and work with what was there and mold it into shape; it was necessary to start again, and again, until the story being told was exactly the right story. 

This relationship between Warren as a scholar, a theorist, a storyteller, a writer, and a phenomenal teacher is indeed something remarkable to celebrate. It’s not surprising that so many people have commented on it. Warren is widely known as the most dedicated of teachers: inspiring, incisive, committed, magnetic.  

Yet in my many, many years of working with him, what I experienced were his efforts to attune to me not just as a student, but as a person; his insight was not just analytical or theoretical, but deeply interpersonal. There were numerous times, over the years, when his comments got to the heart not just of my work, but of me. Observing battles I had with myself and inviting me into the possibility of opening up and letting go. As here, after my PhD defense left me feeling defensive and defeated, addressing the deeply self-critical assessments I had made of myself in an email to him with a generous offering of insight into himself, as if to reciprocate the sharp gaze he was placing on me and mitigate the sharp gaze I was placing on myself: 

Post-dissertation (January 2016): 

“It's a matter of letting go. I find that when I am trying to work out theoretical ideas I tend to get obsessive -- or at least I used to do this -- and keep re-formulating something again and again until it seems right. That can go on endlessly, so that the paper never gets finished. Teaching has helped me, because in a classroom context you are forced to let go -- be satisfied with an explanation that is good enough in the circumstances. When I allowed myself to write more like the way I teach it became easier for me because I could accept "good enough" explanations of things that were necessary to the over-all argument I was advancing -- an over-all argument that was itself simply ‘good enough’ for the purposes. Leave it to Kant or someone like that to be absolutely precise. The rest of us have to be content with approximations. The ideas we work with are all a bit fuzzy, and if you accept that and recognize that you can enter into conversations with people that are productive, not defensive.” 

It’s interesting to note, looking at it now, that this was later than the previous message, where a whole piece needed to be rewritten from scratch to address something that seemed not quite right. It suggests that he was in his own process of letting go and opening up, which was perhaps how he was able to recognize and be gentle with me as I struggled with mine.  

The generosity embedded in this email, his lack of academic ego, and his engagement with his students as a generative site for his storytelling about the political and its continual disavowals in the world and the academy, is something that a generation of his students will carry forward, and the students they teach, and the people they reach. This generosity appears again in comments he sent to a number of us current and former grad students, after soliciting and receiving feedback on his book draft for Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City (Magnusson 2011): 

Book Draft (December 2010): 

Thanks to all of you again for your extensive comments on my manuscript. It's now in production at Routledge, and so I expect that it will be out some time in 2011. The other good news is that Rachel is expecting a baby in July; so, 2011 is shaping up to be a good year. 
 
I've attached the revised version, in case you're interested. … The book remains more abstract than I would like it to be, but I've done as much as I can to use Victoria to illustrate my analytic points. The bunnies allow me to talk about violence in the way I want: that may or may not satisfy the guns and bombs crowd, but I find it amusing. 
 
All the best of the season, and thanks again for your help. If I didn't respond to all of your comments and suggestions, the fault is mine. In a number of cases, I thought ‘Yes, that's true, but I don't think I have anything useful to say about that. I'll leave that matter to a younger and better mind.’ 
 
Warren   

And of course, I could go on and on, because there is no way of saying enough about Warren to capture what an impact he has had on me. And on everyone else who has studied with him, worked with him, or read him, too, I suspect, because we are all findings ways to celebrate him – by gathering, by re-reading, by sharing stories, and by introducing his politics of present, engaged care to our communities. 

So many years of emails, and I treasure each one. When I read the last email I got from him, in the summer of 2022, I experienced all the anticipation of grief that such news can bring, and despite telling myself over and over again that I needed to respond, I could never bring myself to do so. I chose to hide, during this timeline that was both uncertain and very certain. I have my regrets, but I also hold this choice with compassion, now that the anticipated grief has arrived. 

Finding a sense of togetherness with all the people who loved and admired him is very soothing, very healing. There is no one in my immediate, day-to-day life who can possibly understand what the world has lost, in the loss of Warren. Those of us who knew him – wherever we are – we know it, and we feel it, and by creating opportunities to connect, we celebrate the way we are brought into community through him. Our shared memories, love, appreciation, and embodied resonances of Warren weave together, like a protective spell, to bring his presence back and hold the grief at bay for some moments. Insofar as it works, perhaps we can thank him for teaching us how to cast such spells with our shared words. And for teaching us that it matters: it matters which stories we tell, how we tell them, why we believe them, and when it’s time to maybe let them go and tell new ones. 

I have been meditating on these memories and on the felt sense of Warren that still resides in me. And I have come to see better the connection between who he was, how he engaged the world, and his commitment to focusing on the local as the site of lived politics. Warren did not live, teach, or think in abstractions, despite being deeply theoretical. He did everything in relationship with people and the world, in real time, with real heart and soul, and with so much grace.  

Certainly, his intellectual work on urbanism as a way of life – understanding the deeply theoretical work that people do when they gather to solve the problem of how to live together – has irrevocably shaped my own work, from my academic projects on urbanization and aesthetic cities to my professional efforts to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in municipal and post-secondary institutions. I think Warren would be the first to say that taking up his ideas in the world, and not just the academy, is precisely the political point. This is the politics underlying his reflections on pedagogy: letting go of the precision and perfection that can only come with abstracting from the world as it is; letting the approximation of good enough drive the world forward into better; letting these seemingly modest moments of connection be the foundation for trust and the capacity to attune to one another. 

And I think his arguments on the importance of the local and the scale of interpersonal life for building political community in non-sovereign ways are borne out in the collective response to his passing. His claims are evidenced in how our lives change, and our communities form, shape, and extend over time and space, as we truly open to and engage with each other, rather than stay defensive due to the stories we have made up about each other. Or, for that matter, about ourselves.  

So, wherever we are, whenever we engage with Warren’s legacy we gather as a community, recognizing that nothing can approximate the experience of being with Warren in person … despite how much I’ve tried this past month: not the remnant videos online, not the endless threads of emails, not the books that invite us into the world and his way of seeing it as a city. And that’s what makes it all so precious. So worth engaging, from the places where we are, every day, with a clear mind and an open and honest heart. And so worth fighting for.  

Warren teaches us this, and I am proud to have been his student.

References 

Bagelman, Jennifer Jean, and Delacey Tedesco. 2015. "Introduction." International Political Sociology 9 (1): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12078.  

Magnusson, Warren. 2015. "Bringing Politics Back In." International Political Sociology 9 (1): 91–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12079. 

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Delacey Tedesco is Associate Director, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Okanagan College.