Expanding the borders of The Sociological Imagination: Spatial difference and social inequality

Abstract

This article argues that C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination has changed, as evident in sociologies that think beyond national societies and analyse globalization. This ‘imagination’ has in effect been ‘expanded’, moving from one-dimensional (linear) analyses based on historical vectors of force and teleologies to a more contextualized, relativized spatial analysis with more dimensions. There were always outliers. However, at least for mainstream North American sociology, this represents a change in the spatialization of social science, a change in its presuppositions about space, not the becoming spatial of a non-spatial sociology. Borders and mobilities across and along borders are examined in relation to what is needed to confront them critically in a new spatial regime – a new ‘spatialization’ of the social. A hypothesis is developed that understands borderlines relationally as institutions and social technologies that introduce difference and inequalities into an otherwise homogeneous social and spatiotemporal ‘cultural topology’.