Unsettling Master Categories: Notes on Studying the Global in C. W. Mills’ Footsteps

Abstract

C. W. Mills’ sociology arises out of the problematizing of established “truths.” The aim becomes a sociology that unsettles—not a sociology of unsettlement but a sociology that is itself unsettling. In this short essay I focus on themes that capture one way (mine) of executing C. W. Mills’ challenge to us, academic sociologists. The substantive focus is on what is needed to develop critical globalization studies. The accepted narratives and explanations of globalization have produced the global as a master category that obscures as much as it reveals. We need to generate new questions for research to recover what has been excluded by dominant narratives. And we need to develop conceptual architectures that allow us to detect what we might think of as countergeographies of globalization. Here I focus particularly on types of spaces where we can find resistance to global power and as yet unrecognized forms of participation by actors typically represented as powerless, or victims, or as uninvolved with global conditions. The overall project is a critical remapping of the analytic and political terrain of the global.