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Sociological Imagination

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Course TypeCourse CodeNo. Of Credits
Foundation ElectiveSGA1EL1054

Semester and Year Offered: Winter Semester, 2018-2019

Course Coordinator and Team: Teena Anil

Email of course coordinator: teena@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: NA

Aim: The spirit of the course’s to familiarize the students with the emergence and growth of sociology as a discipline, selected concepts and theoretical contributions of pioneer of the discipline with regards to social processes and the methods of their study. It also contextualizes of some fundamental human concerns and the way sociology can offer us directions and pointers for them

Objectives;

To familiarize with central traditions of sociology ;

Learn to analyse some of the main debates concerning the nature of social

Enabling Sociological Imagination and apply sociological ways of looking at human societies in order to analyse complex social issues critically

Course Outcomes: With the progression and completion of this course students will be able to

  1. Identify key theorists and terms in Sociology and cultivate a sociological imagination
  2. Demonstrate a knowledge of key texts and topics related to, sociology in general and to the project modernity in particular
  3. Use written and oral skills to apply an academic argument with reference to the contemporary issues in sociology
  4. Demonstrate an awareness of critical skills required to read a range of texts and analyse the issues of social inequality
  5. Apply research skills to source materials for class presentations and assessment tasks by being actively engaged with structural and cultural issues across the globe.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Unit 1. The Social Question: (3 weeks) Tracing the journey of sociology as an intellectual field, this unit will focus briefly on the way sociology as discipline has responded to the new age through its methods and concern it raises at the global as well as at the local.

The Emergence of Sociology as a discipline,

Karl Marx: Materialist conception of history, Capitalist Modes of Production

Emile Durkheim: Social Fact, Individual and Society

Max Weber : Ideal Types and Bureaucracy

Unit 2. Genealogy of the Basic Concepts (3 weeks) In this unit students will be introduced to basic concepts in sociology-every discipline has set of concepts, which are evolving with time and space.

Disenchantment

Modernity

Unit 3. Reflecting Modernity: From Disenchantment to Promise (3 weeks) Initiating the delicate debate of the increasing rationalization of the world by Max Weber. The unit critically unravel the foundations of modernity and its grand narratives and develop at alternative reading of modernity.

Unit 4 : Situating Modernity Contextualizing Indian Social question (3 weeks) Interrogating abstracted grand theorization, the unit aims to sensitize, to locate our experiment with modernity, to engage in theorization from our experience rather than implanting borrowed ideas.

Assessment Details with weights: The course will have 5 types of assessment situations.

Students will be assessed in continuous assessment mode on the basis of their participation in class and their engagement with the educational resources. This involves in-class discussion, mid semester exam (combined: 10%)

  1. The second assessment will involve a project report related to research interest of choice. This involves a field work, field diary, report writing (20%).
  2. The third assessment will involve a project report Presentation based on field report is (20%)
  3. The fourth assessment will involves students participation through discussion and reflection on each unit on and its related e-content uploaded on MOODLE, which is of an open source LMS (10%)
  4. The fifth assessment will consist of a final examination (40%).

Reading List:

  1. Marx, K. and Friedrich Engels. 2002. The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  2. E. 1958. The Rules of Sociological Method. Glencoe: Free Press, Chapters 1Page No. 50-59 and 3 Page No 61.
  3. Gerth, H.H. and C. Wright Mills (eds.) 1948. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Introduction Page no. 45-70.
  4. Horton, P.B. and C.L. Hunt, 1985, Sociology, New York: McGraw Hill, Chapter 4, pp. 79-103
  5. Ritzer, G. (2005), Sociological Theories, McGraw Hill Education India. Page nos. 2-9, 76-91, 113-119, 555-562
  6. Giddens Anthony; 1990, The Consequence of Modernity. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. Page no 1-53.
  7. Stiglitz, E. Joseph. (2002), Globalization and Its Discontents, W.W. Nortan and Company, Page No. 53-88.
  8. Jameson, Fedrick (1984), Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146:53-92.
  9. Weber, Max. 1958) ‘The Nature of the City’, in Weber, M. The City (Translated by Martindale, D. and Neuwirth, G.) Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press.
  10. Srinivas, M.N., 1969, “The Caste System in India”, in A. Beteille (ed.) Social Inequality: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp.265-272.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCE: