ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the place of the North East of England as the fieldwork site such as demographic details on area economy, character, culture within a regional, national and international context. A global sociological imagination offers the possibility of refiguring the relationship between the past and the present and the near and the 'far'. Such a global sociological imagination is seen to work against a 'facile internationalism', claiming to speak for all everywhere: that the place, or pace, of certain nations are often accredited with a transformative future-orientated potential, situated against 'other' borderlands, fails to attend to legacies, presences and futures that carry across and intersect place as a continued, rather than new effect of 'globalization'. To think of continuations and parallels in and beyond the North East is not necessarily to "upscale' place, to make the local stand for the global: instead it is anticipated that different distances reveal what, where and who is rendered proximate or remote.
