Encounters between economic theory and other social sciences have come to be characterized by debates about the respective claims to truth, truthfulness, and authority that can be derived from different disciplinary methodologies. With the advance of quantitative statistics and mathematics-based reasoning, the economics profession has advanced claims of universal validity which allegedly rank the discipline first and foremost among the social sciences . A related development has been the “colonization” of other fields of the social sciences by economic methods. As a consequence, many scholars in disciplines such as politics and sociology have become either awed or wary of economic theory and methodology. In these—and many other—disciplines, there has also been a turn away from attempts at generalization and an increasing focus on the particular, the local, and the historically distinct . But a growing minority of social scientists has also been engaged in critical reflection within and across disciplines. These efforts center on reflexive analysis of the extra-disciplinary contexts for the production of knowledge, and the advantages and limits of different disciplinary methods. While IPS has published many examples of “international political sociologists” constructing such pathways among the disciplines, little attention has been paid to those economists who might be following a similar trace. Yet the number of economists developing links across disciplines has been growing, with interesting and important results. We therefore find it appropriate to begin the IPS interview series with Malaysian economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram, who has been a pioneer in this endeavor . Jomo has developed a form of economic thinking that steers clear of excessive abstraction and formalization, as well as the universalizing pretensions that tend to accompany those techniques—without giving up on the idea that economic reasoning has important contributions to make toward the solving of critical problems. He has done so in …