‘Only connect’: the challenge of globalisation for the social sciences

This paper examines the challenge posed by globalisation to social scientific research and the curriculum. It does so primarily in the context of sociology and in reflection upon C. Wright Mills's argument for the ‘sociological imagination’. The latter has recently been taken up again in calls for a new public sociology and the present paper considers the new challenges that exist for the social scientific imagination in our current age. Arguing for a social science of connections, the paper suggests that a global social science is properly thought of as a series of local social sciences in dialogue with each other and open to transformation in the light of other perspectives and locations of knowledge. It concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for the curriculum.