Global Attentiveness and the Sociological Ear

Abstract

This paper argues for the training of a global attentiveness that reconfigures the epistemic apparatus of sociology, to admit not only the legacy of empire but also an appreciation of how the dynamics of the British social formation are intimately tied to imperial and postcolonial networks. It argues not for provincialising British sociology and its modes of thought but for rendering explicit the implication near at hand and the postcolonial elsewhere. Sociological knowledge as a consequence needs to challenge what it dismisses as unthinkable - be it the history of empire in its own modern formation or the contemporary turn to the sacred and otherworldly - in order to extend its imagination to a truly global scale.