Drawing on various disciplinary perspectives, namely sociology, philosophy, political science and history, the course introduces the students to concepts, theories and empirical evidences addressing the question: what is specific to social—in parallel to economic or political—condition of living? The course also explores critiques of Eurocentric understanding of ‘social’ and ‘society’ those have emerged from global South and Latin America. In the process, it examines dynamics of societies with very different developmental trajectories under ‘aegis’ of colonial modernity. 

This course explores how identities of ethnicity, caste, religion, sex, etc. thematise themselves within a quest for equal citizenship. Within the certitudes of modern Western political theory, these markers of identity were supposed to remain confined to the ‘private’. For particular identities to feature in transactions between the state and the citizen would be seen as the remnants of a different time. But who had access to the status of the ‘universal’? Did not the rights-bearing citizen have a pre-given identity—‘white, male, middle class’? If the universals were masked particulars, then the particulars had to come up with a critique of the so-called universals. As M. S. S. Pandian wrote, ‘one step outside modernity’ was to be ‘one step ahead of modernity’. We study the politics of identity through a focus on caste in modern India. We combine a study of the original writings of Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar with secondary literature on the subject. With Sumit Sarkar and Nancy Fraser, we complicate our understanding of a politics of recognition by comparing it with a politics of redistribution—in the process, cross-examining the binary.

This course introduces students to the historical evolution of the language of cinema, its material pre-conditions, and ideological moorings. The course uses select canonical texts and cutting edge scholarship to combine a historical overview with methodological finesse. The students will be exposed to an array of film genres, and a range of methodologies for studying films, such as formal, phenomenological, and ethnographic methods, and the myriad possibilities within these. The course aims to equip students with a theoretical understanding of film as a medium and a cultural artefact, the implications of the film form, and its potentialities for analysis of culture in general.  

The course introduces and discusses various philosophical approaches/ methods to research in Humanities and Social Sciences. By taking the philosophical method of hermeneutics, phenomenology, Frankfurt school, and deconstructive reading, the course is divided into four modules—the hermeneutical method, the phenomenological method, critical method, and deconstructive method. To introduce students to research methods in human and social sciences, the course will explicate the application of theory to practice by taking the philosophical approaches of these various methods and applying them to textual interpretation and by employing philosophical phenomenology and critical method to the understanding of social phenomena. Sample Texts: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960), Truth and Method, trans Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. London and New York: Continuum, (reprint) 2006;  Clark Moustakas: Phenomenological Research Methods. California: Sage Publications, 1994.

Given the rich and diverse intellectual climate in India, it is important to locate the discipline of Sociology within the Indian context. Drawing from the works of eminent scholars this course will adopt a sociological lens to analyze Indian society. In particular, the course will engage in discussion on caste, family and relationship structures, and law to understand how these social institutions are crucial for the development of Indian society. Various forms of online material will be used to explain the core concepts of this course. In this course, students will be introduced to a range of data collection and fieldwork methods, such as ethnography, online interviews, in-depth and face-to-face interviews. Additionally, in this course, students will also be taught how to do a close reading of a text, write reflection papers as well as analyze the intersections between caste, class, ethnicity, and gender in contemporary Indian society. Some of the main texts of this course are as follows: M.N. Srinivas, (1976). The remembered village; Patricia Uberoi, (2009). Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India; Pratiksha Baxi (2010). Justice is a secret: Compromise in rape trials, Contributions to Indian Sociology.

Both Time and Narrative being broad constructs that are likely to travel in multiple directions, this course has been designed with a specific focus: Literary Modernism. Modernism as an aesthetic movement is as remarkable for its global resonances as for its various avatars, whether high-modern, inter-modern, post-modern (or even anti-modern for that matter). Decisively shaped by the two world wars, these interests in embracing or questioning the notion of ‘make it new’ (Ezra Pound’s words that became emblematic of this artistic turn) have sustained across different historical-cultural contexts. More importantly, they have had a significant impact on how we, as a contemporary audience, think about the relationship between text and context. This course encourages a critical engagement with three specific facets: the narrative question–how form/style/genre interplay with content/story; the time question–how experienced and perceived time gets differentiated from clock time; the brow question–how aesthetic hierarchies have influenced modernism. 

This course is an introduction to the ethical thinking of the twentieth-century continental philosophy—Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Feminist theory. Their ethical ideas can be situated within the ethical turn of the 20th-century continental philosophy, which offers a relook at the existential problem of human relationships in the texts of philosophy. The focus of the course will be on the ethics of care, the ethics ‘towards-the-other’, and the idea of radical hospitality and responsibility ‘towards-the-other’ in Levinas and Derrida. The problem of human relationships between the ‘other’ and the ‘I’ and the question of who is the ‘other’ will be examined in this course through the works of Levinas and Derrida. Sample Texts: 

Emmanuel Levinas, (1961) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff publishers, 1979; Jacques Derrida, (1997) Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

This cross-listed interdisciplinary course aims to present some of the key themes and debates within gender, sexuality, society, and the larger national internationalist orders. It will seek to show how these thematics resonate within literary, social and historiographic fields. There will be a sense of the global history of these debates, as well as applications within the Indian context. Topics discussed include themes of science, history, pleasure, empire and popular culture. There will be the discussion of normative forms of relation such as the heterosexual family with its ideas of masculinity and gender roles. In select assignments, and the term paper, students may, if they prefer, write the assignment/paper using sources entirely from their discipline of English or Sociology—they are also given options to mix the disciplines, with due consultations.

This course will draw from the medical sociology, public health, and development literature to examine the relationship between disease, health, and inequality. The course will encourage students’ critical engagement in understanding the embodiment of inequality and the larger historical, social, and economic forces that shape people’s health experiences globally. In particular, the course will begin with a discussion on the links between science and colonialism and subsequently move on to more contemporary debates on the inequalities of disease, suffering and infections, social determinants of health and illness, organ trafficking, and commodification of human bodies, bioethics of global health practices and a critique of humanitarian aid and market-based medicine in the context of global health. The major texts of this course are Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897); Michel Foucault’s Birth of a Clinic (1963); Bryan Turner’s The New Medical Sociology (2004). 

This course will examine the call for establishing a discipline called 'Singles Studies' which aims at addressing the neglected category of the single person across disciplines. It argues for the inclusion of a single person's fresh perspective on issues of family, gender, time, ageing, the city, law and medicine. If a singles perspective is to be integrated in research, it cannot merely be additive. It has to transform the way we approach research. The course will have several themes, and will examine singlehood in relation to time, media, housing, the city, ageing, health and consumerism. The course will introduce the field of singles studies for the first time in academia and explore the lives of single people in India, the United States, the UK and Israel. Sample Readings: DePaulo, Bella. 2006. Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. St Martin’s Press; Kislev, Elyakim. 2019. Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living. California, University of California Press.  

Speculative Indias What is it to speculate? This course looks at various modes of ‘speculation’ across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Examining fiction and non-fiction texts, images, graphic narratives and poems, the course explores interdisciplinary theories of ‘speculation’ within the context of the post-millennial, Indian socio-cultural specifically. Taking in ideas of mythology, speculative fiction, cultural citizenship, near-future urban living, precarity and human rights, the course emphasises critical reading, writing and invites students to consider countercultural ideas of India and Indianness embedded in the post-millennial and future moment.  

The course introduces students to social structural conditions of politics and polity. It explores themes such as power, state and sovereignty, citizen subject, caste and politics etc. The course also attempts to highlight methodological lessons which may be drawn from thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Partha Chatterjee in studying social and collective formations.