On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Jim McKay, a wide ranging and influential international scholar on sport, gender, power and globalization, reflects on the benefits for the field of revisiting C Wright Mill and his work on the ‘sociological imagination.’ McKay notes this is important at a time when the ‘parent’ discipline of sociology continues to exhibit myriad longstanding controversies and crises and the hegemony of neoliberal ‘common’ sense continues to affect adversely the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In focusing on the challenges of the field, the author draws on Mills’ distinction between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues,’ and their ongoing relation to diverse issues such as the study of minority experiences in sport, the agenda for research on sport, development and peace, achieving a rapprochement between tourism and sport studies, and the building of a performative cultural studies approach to sport. The essay closes by focusing on the affinities between Mills’ standpoint of ‘studying up’ power structures and other critical epistemologies that interrogate neoliberal hegemony.
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