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.
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.