<p>Recent developments in pain science, buttressed by findings from neuroimaging, have supported the view that pain is a thoroughly biopsychosocial phenomenon, one that is differentially distributed in inequitable ways. However, the social aspects of pain are still poorly articulated and understood. While pain science has struggled to make sense of what is social, social science has sometimes relied too heavily on the phenomenological experience of pain as isolating. Drawing on key insights from the developing neuroscience of pain - that pain is a response to threat, and that chronic pain can result from central sensitization of the nervous system - I argue that social scientists can productively engage with pain research by developing a critical social science of pain. This social science should engage with pain as a communicative process through which to learn about threat; understand how social inequity may produce and exacerbate pain; and look critically at how the methodologies used to measure and document pain will also shape it. This includes critical engagement with our own social science methods for knowing about pain. Undertaking this work is crucial to producing relevant and contemporary research on pain, particularly in a sociopolitical context where inequality is rising.</p>