INVITATION TO SOCIOLOGY WITH AN ATTITUDE

The Freed Kamaiya movement in western Nepal

SociologySeminar Series 2014Winter Semester 

The Freed Kamaiya movement in western Nepal:A fieldwork-based account

By Dr. Michael Hoffmann

Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology

Chair: Dr. Ankur Datta

Michael Hoffmann is an anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in Nepal. He is interested in economic and political anthropology, work and labour, Inequality, Maoism and anthropology of revolutions. 

Date, time and place:
 19 February 2014, Wednesday

Time: 02.30 PM

Mezzanine Hall, South Asian University, 

Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri,

New Delhi 110021

ALL ARE CORDIALLY INVITED

(Please have your mobile phones switched off during lecture and discussion)

SAU Sociology: Cinema and Society Series -2014 - My Mother India

My Mother India

Image from: http://www.ucfilms.in/subject/culture/my-mother-india/

'My Mother India' is a passionate film told by the child of a mixed marriage and set against the tumultuous backdrop of modern Indian history.  With an Indian father who collects kitch calendars, an Australian mother who hangs her knickers out to dry in front of the horrified Indian neighbours, a grandfather who was a self-styled Guru and a fiercely man-hating grandmother - it is no wonder that Safina Uberoi made a film about her family!   What begins as a quirky and humorous documentary about an eccentric, multicultural upbringing unfolds into a complex commentary on the social, political and religious events of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 which tore this family apart.

 

AWARDS RECEIVED: CRC Award, Dendy Awards – Sydney Film Festival 2002, Script Writing Award, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2002, Best Long Form Documentary, Australian Teachers of Media Awards 2002, Odyssey Award for Best Documentary, Real: Life On Film Festival 2002, Jury Prize for Best Australian Documentary, Australian Film Critics Circle 2002, Special Jury Award, Hawaii International Film Festival 2001, Special Commendation, Mill Valley International Film Festival 2001, Best Video Production, Melbourne International Film Festival 2001, Best Pitch, Heidtman/AFTRS Award 1998

DATE:          Tuesday, 4 February, 2014

TIME:          2:30 – 4:15 pm

VENUE:       FSI Hall, Akbar Bhawan

Director Safina Uberoi will discuss the film and answer your questions after the screening

All are welcome

Please have you mobile phones switched off during the film and dicuission

‘Theoretical Imagination: A Double-edged Sword?’ A Panel discussion convened by students in the MA program in Sociology (Sem 2), South Asian University

Sociology Seminar Series 2013-14

Inhabiting ‘Childhood’ in Postcolonial India

By Sarada Balagopalan,

Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi

Chair: 

Diya Mehra, Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi 

This paper discusses street children’s lives in relation to the local materialization of a global politics of ‘childhood’. The street child -- at once ‘victim’ and yet highly ‘agential’-- signals a certain messiness around assumed vectors of age, care, ability and innocence that this normative ‘childhood’ register works with. Through capturing a moment in which global, national and local efforts combined to improve and transform these children’s lives through school enrolment and new discourses of ‘children's rights’, this paper focuses on the complexity and contemporaneity of their extensive practices of dwelling generated by the exigencies of survival within postcolonial ‘development’. It considers whether these practices of dwelling - which can neither be dissolved through a ‘cultural’ reading of these children’s lives nor resolved within a more technocratic policy norm – might be a productive opening to re-thinking ‘childhood’ more generally.

Sarada Balagopalan is on the editorial board of the journal Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research and has published in several journals including EPW and Contemporary Education Dialogue. She is the author of Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India. 

Date: 29 January 2014, Wednesday

Time and Venue: 02.30 PM

FSI Hall, Ground Floor, South Asian University,

Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri,

New Delhi 110021 

ALL ARE CORDIALLY INVITED

(Please have your mobile phones switched off during lecture and discussion)

Sociology Seminar Series 2014

Sociology Seminar Series 2014  

Winter Semester 2014

Schedule for the Semester

Date	Title	Presenter
29 January	Inhabiting ‘Childhood’ in Postcolonial India	Sarada Balagopalan, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
12 February	Mapping London: Somali Women in Public Space	Hudita Nura Mustafa, Independent Scholar
19 February	The freed Kamaiya movement in western Nepal: a fieldwork-based account	Michael Hoffman, Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology
5 March	Community identity, cosmopolitanism and the city- being Anglo-Indian and Chinese in Calcutta/Kolkata	Jayani Bonnerjee, Centre de Sciences Humaines
26 March	Subordinate Spatialities: Historicizing Housing, Language and Identity in Wagdara: A Kolam Village in Wardha, India	Venugopal Maddipati, Ambedkar University Delhi
2 April	Sudden Selves: ‘Personality Development', Tupperware and the Making of New Labour in North India	Sanjay Srivastava, Institute of Economic Growth
16 April	"You Call Yourself Gay Because You're Hifi": Critiquing The Political Economy of Sexuality in South Asia	Svati Shah, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Coordinated by Ankur Datta and Diya Mehra

Time: 02.30 PM 

Venue:

FSI Hall, Ground Floor, South Asian University, 

Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri,

New Delhi 110021

ALL ARE CORDIALLY INVITED

Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences,  Akbar Bhawan, South Asian University, Chankayapuri, New Delhi 110021

Phone: 24122512; 24122513; 24122514

Webpage: http://www.southasianuniversity.org/Faculties/FSS/FSS.html

Official Departmental Blog: http://sociology-sau.blogspot.in/

                        Sociology Students’ Blog: https://sausociology.wordpress.com/

‘Conditions of Knowing’: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Theory and Methodology

Workshop

As an initiative of the Faculty of Social Sciences, an interdisciplinary workshop on the matter of ‘theory and methodology in the social sciences’ has been planned for the  24 , 28 and 31 October 2013 from 4.30 pm to 6.30 pm at the Mezzanine Floor and FSI Hall of South Asian University. While research students undergo courses in theory and methodology, how do they relate these two programmes together? What are the challenges in bridging the seeming gap between theory and methodology? How do students and the faculty who conduct classes on these two topics really understand theory and methodology? Can a conversation on these two crucial themes be initiated between proponents of different social science disciplines?

The workshop is aimed at PhD students and academic colleagues in the Faculty of Social Sciences. We hope that this workshop will initiate conversations between departments in the Faculty of Social Sciences and foster a climate of interdisciplinary engagement among colleagues and students. Followup events planned fr 2014 and beyond will be open to wider academic participation. 

Preamble

The pursuit of scholarship involves a number of interests ranging from the pragmatic, to the normative or positivist state of things to the political. The existence of numerous disciplines which fall under the broad rubric of the social sciences contributes to this complexity. Often, the structure of social science disciplines as they are taught is extremely dependant on the composition and approach of a concerned department. For example, the University of Chicago houses Departments of Sociology, Anthropology and Economics which stand out for promoting particular agendas, hence giving rise to schools of thought in those fields. Perhaps one of the greatest sources of complexity and strength in social science scholarship is the diversity of approaches, areas of interest and styles of teaching and pedagogy across departments. 

At the core of every social science discipline, especially as they are broken down into teachable components for students, there appear to be two universals: theory and methodology. The question of theory is often regarded to be central to any discipline. Methodology is considered critical to the pursuit and the craft of knowledge. Yet, these two components of scholarship are subject to continuous debate. Students and faculty members in the social sciences are often faced with a situation whereby theory and/or methodology are fetishized, leading to an unproductive divide between what is imagined to be theoretical and the empirical.

The social sciences are marked by the diversity of ways of doing research. Sociological research alone often includes scholarship facilitated by quantitative research methods, ethnography, case studies and archival research among others. Scholarship in International Relations demonstrates diversity of both methods and of theoretical approaches from related disciplines of Political Science, History and Political Economy.  However, methodology may often be misunderstood for a fetishization of methods.

On the whole, regardless of the disciplinary perspective and approaches we may employ, a conversation across disciplines on matters of theory and methodology is crucial as it shapes the conditions of knowing.

Format

The format of the workshop will consist of three panels to be conducted over three days after teaching hours: The first two panels will deal with concerns of methodology and theory for the two constituent departments of the Faculty of Social Sciences: Sociology and International Relations.  Each of these sessions will feature short presentations of notes shared by faculty members on theory and methodology. The faculty members will then be followed by presentations made by the PhD students of each department. Each presentation will last 10-15 minutes. The end of each panel will be followed by a session for questions from the audience addressed to panellists.

The third panel will consist of a roundtable session bringing together all faculty members from the two departments of the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Panel I-Sociology

Date: 24.10.13 Time: 4.30pm-6pm

Venue: FSI Hall

Chair: Dr. Dev Pathak

Name	Topic	Time
Ankur Datta	Notes on Theory	10 min
Chudamani Basnet	Notes on Methodology	10 min
Krishna Pandey	Student Intervention	15 min
Kumud Bhansal	Student Intervention	15 min
Question and Answer Session		20 Minutes

Panel II- International Relations

Date: 28.10.2013 Time: 4.30pm-6pm

Venue: FSI Hall

Chair: Prof. Rajen Harshe

Name	Topic	Time
Siddharth Mallavarapu	Notes on Theory	10 min
Jayashree Vivekanandan	Notes on Methodology	10 min
Vaishali Raghuvanshi	Student Intervention	15 min
Omar Sadr	Student Intervention	15 min
Anu Krishna SS	Student Intervention	15 Min
Question and Answer Session		20 Minutes

Panel-III- Round Table-Involving faculty members from the departments of International Relations and Sociology

Date: 31.10.2013

Time: 4.30pm-6pm

Venue: Mezzanine Floor

Chair: Prof. S. Perera, Dean FSS

Agenda for the Round Table

Is there a gap between theory and methodology in the Social Sciences? If so, can this gap be bridged?

What can students and practitioners in the disciplines of Sociology and International Relations learn from each other?

What do we understand by the ‘conditions of knowing’?

Workshop and Series Coordinators

Ankur Datta, Department of Sociology.

Siddharth Mallavarapu, Department of International Relations.