IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

This paper highlights how the material conditions of organisations co-construct organisational meanings and realities, investigating this in the context of a crisis-affected feminist space in London. The case study is that of the Feminist Library, as an organisation that has undergone various periods of spatial crisis-driven transition throughout its history – an example of a precarious yet resilient feminist space. The paper explores the socio-material, organisational effects of these crises, while also putting these in the current context of 21st-century London, its austerity and gentrification politics, and what these mean for alternative organisations and their futurity. Conceptually, the paper builds on the work of Lefebvre (1991, 1996) on the social production of space and the right to the city, as well as Dale (2005) on social materialities, suggesting that materialities and organisational dynamics are mutually co-constitutive. From a queer feminist perspective – building on Sara Ahmed’s (2006) queer phenomenology, focusing on disorientations from the normative – the analysis also suggests that feminist organisational realities need to be considered in their changing socio-political, economic, and geographical contexts. This becomes particularly evident at transitory times in organisational history, as evidenced here through the Library case study, as it becomes transformed into a space of new communities and precarities in its latest Peckham site and throughout its longer trajectory. The methods used include archival sources, interviews, and autoethnographic data. The paper should thus be of interest to scholars of organisational studies with a focus on space and alternative organisations, feminist thinkers, spatial practitioners and archivists, as well as architecture and planning researchers.