In the twenty-first century, the social sciences face new intellectual and political challenges. The world has been undergoing profound political and military upheavals, in which both national and international relations of power are being transformed.

Increasingly global capitalist relations pose old questions of inequality and social conflict in new forms. Both the contents and forms of cultural relations are rapidly changing, together with their political and economic significance, and the challenge of the Internet is part of this process.

the challenges

The global site has been founded, therefore, to address five challenges to our understanding that these developments raise for the social sciences:

• new interrelations of political, economic and cultural power
• new interrelations of national and international forms
• new media impacts on culture and society
• new conditions for emancipatory social and political theory and method
• new conditions for agency in a more global world

research and debate

The site exists to promote serious academic analysis of all questions relevant to this broad problematic. It is founded on the assumption that in periods of change, the answers to these questions are likely to be highly contested. Old theoretical models and analyses may be challenged, renewed, extended or superseded. The roles of continuity in change and vice versa are central problems. The global site is therefore open to serious academic work from a variety of theoretical standpoints and methodological viewpoints.

interdisciplinarity

While working within academic disciplines, the global site recognizes the often disabling character of divisions between disciplinary fields, and seeks to promote coherent debate across major fields like sociology, politics, social anthropology and international relations, as well as existing interdisciplinary fields like cultural, media and development studies. The global site is based in a university, Sussex, which has a unique historic commitment to interdisciplinarity. The site aims to demonstrate the meaning of this value in new political, intellectual and technical conditions.

new styles of work

The global site encourages a variety of levels of analysis, styles and lengths of intellectual work. We believe that working through a website offers new opportunities for flexibility in scholarship and debate, and in developing the site we encourage our contributors and readers not just to reproduce established methods of work, but to explore the new possibilities of this medium.

the editors, April 2000