Courses

This course introduces major topics in international finance and provides an analytical framework for addressing issues in international monetary economics. This course mainly focuses on exchange rate determination and the effectiveness of the monetary and the fiscal policies of in the open economy.

Well-being is one of the most popular topics in positive psychology. This is a relatively new approach that focuses on positive aspects as opposed to the psychopathological perspective of traditional psychology. This course will trace research in the area of well-being. Relevant concepts such as positive emotions, character strengths and resilience will be introduced and their relation to well-being will be examined. Positive psychology interventions that enhance well-being and positive outcomes in life will be explored.

This course is designed to expose students to the basic principles of economics. The emphasis will be on thinking like an economist and the course will illustrate how economic concepts can be applied to analyze real-life situations.

This course introduces fundamental concepts in the Postcolonial Studies. It also focus on the broad political contexts for the emergence of this discourse, the major departures that it makes from the western discourses and its relevance to Indian theory production. The course involves in analyzing some texts which are considered seminal in the discipline both in the western and Indian contexts.

This course introduces students to Western painting, sculpture and architecture. Areas covered include cave art, Mesopotamian and Egyptian art, Greece and Rome, Medieval Architecture, the Renaissance, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop art.

New Media technologies are products of the digital revolution and are rapidly transforming the ‘everyday’ life of societies and individuals. These have enabled new channels of information, social networking, and commerce and more importantly, the creation of a virtual life. This course focuses on the sociology of new media technologies, with a specific aim to anchor them within select theoretical debates and in specific geographic contexts. The course is intended to contribute to an understanding of impacts on individual and society through the use of new digital media tools for example the internet, social media, mobile phone technologies and devices. Many of the case studies, supporting theory, will center on people in cross-cultural, resource-poor and emerging market settings, for example, developing countries, the urban slum etc.

Information and Communications Technology for Development is a growing area of research and community of scholars studying the role of technology in international development. Students in this course will study contemporary debates, issues and field projects that engage with information and communication technologies [ICTs] in the service of socio-economic progress and human development. This means a range of things: it could refer to the scope of technology in alleviating poverty, in impacting low-resource settings, in designing and engineering relevant technologies to close digital literacy gaps in specific populations.

• Role of financial markets • Interest rates and their role in valuation • Money Market • Bond Market • Equity market • Foreign Exchange Market

Designed for the beginning student of literature, this course provides an overview of the traditional and modern approaches of narration used largely by the short story genre. By reading a selection of short literary narratives that represent various cultures across the world, this course examines how plot and cultural contexts function in short stories to give rise to a variety of forms presently associated with this genre. The student is expected to read and critically interpret these narratives and submit their responses in the form of both oral and written presentations.

This course will introduce students to the field of social and cultural anthropology and sociology. They will be exposed to different cultures of the world, and how social and cultural attitudes and behaviours are so different and yet so similar, across cultures. The course will enable them to understand cultures in the Americas (north and south America), Asia, Europe and Africa. Students will also learn to understand and appreciate ethnography as a method and an approach to study world cultures. It will give them an international exposure to some major issues of interest in the 21st century- about environment, globalisation, media and health. Students will read chapters from the assigned textbook, as well as articles, and will watch documentaries in class.

This course provides an overview of Modernism—provisionally defined as art produced between 1900 and 1945—through canonical British and American literary texts. Since developments in the visual arts were particularly influential in the evolution of literary Modernism, we will also periodically examine Modernist art—principally painting and sculpture—in order to understand wider aesthetic tendencies. Through close readings of important prose, verse, and visual texts of the period, we will ask ourselves: What is Modernism? How is Modernism in the arts and literature related to dominant historical, philosophical, political, and cultural trends in the first half of the twentieth century? In what ways do Modernist texts reimagine the act of reading? How is Modernism related to preceding movements like Romanticism and to Postmodern literature and art?

This course will present an introduction to the field of psychotherapy, including an understanding of basic counseling psychology theory and techniques followed by therapeutic models used by mental health practitioners. The aim of this course is to give students an idea about contemporary psychotherapy techniques used to help people address emotional and mental issues. The course especially aims to sensitize students the holistic nature of the field of mental health counseling and its subsequent benefits. This course is practical and interactive in its style of instruction, with student participation being particularly recommended. The mode of evaluation for this course is through assignments and presentations.

This course takes an in-depth look at the history and heritage of the city of Hyderabad. With more than four hundred years of history, including sites suggested for inclusion in the world heritage list, and simultaneously traversing the ‘global’ tag, Hyderabad has lots of stories to tell. Through assigned readings and lectures, field trips to selected heritage sites, and interviews with residents, students will get to understand various facets to the city of Hyderabad. Assessment will be based on individual written essays and group projects. This course involves significant amount of reading and writing, and discussions in class.

Medical humanities is an emerging field, which looks at the increasingly inter-disciplinary world of medicine. This course will introduce students to humanities and social science perspectives about the human body, health and illness experience. The aim is to highlight multiple ways through which medical worlds and experiences can be approached and understood. The course will focus on the interpretation of medicine from the world of arts, literature, history, anthropology and psychology. By looking at paintings, biographies, novels, ethnographies, and films, the course will engage in detailed discussions on some key topics such as narrative medicine, history of medicine, cross-cultural communication, disability studies and lived experience. Field trips to practitioners of different systems of medicine will be undertaken. Readings will be followed by interactive class discussions. Assessment will be based on written essays and class presentations.

How are cities of the future being imagined and planned? Who is being imagined as a citizen of emerging urban-scapes? Whose aspirations get factored into city-planning and whose are ignored? What kinds of expert knowledges are at play? As cities worldwide experience dramatic growth, attending to associated social, political, environmental, technological challenges become ever-more urgent. This course examines some key themes in contemporary debates in urban studies to understand the kinds of challenges rapid urbanization poses, and ways in which different stakeholders are responding to these. This is a research based course, in which students will proactively work with government reports, planning documents, and scholarly literature to understand the problems and pitfalls of urban growth. In particular, we will collectively seek to analyze the current masterplan for the greater Hyderabad metropolitan area, Hyderabad Masterplan 2031.

Medical humanities is an emerging field, which looks at the increasingly inter-disciplinary world of medicine. This course will introduce students to humanities and social science perspectives about the human body, health and illness experience. The aim is to highlight multiple ways through which medical worlds and experiences can be approached and understood.

This course discusses key literary texts, ranging from classics like Frankenstein to late-20th-century artifacts like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the script for the movie The Matrix, in order to explore how language and literary traditions have attempted to understand the relationship between art and science. The premise of the course is that literature (and the humanities in general) and science as it has evolved since the 17th century are neither antagonistic nor mutually exclusive.

This course is an introduction to the field of Human-Computer interaction research with a focus on ‘human’ and how the HCI domain interfaces with the social sciences. The course begins with a selection of seminal work that establish the HCI domain: interactive systems/techniques, design and user interfaces. We will then move on to topics including social and context aware computing, design research and evaluation methods. Radically different ways of interacting with computationally based systems are possible, ranging from the visual [surfaces, input devices] to the invisible [sensor technologies, back end processors] and importantly social [which means non-technological] affectations triggering diverse ways of interfacing with technology. This course will center on the processes and challenges of ideating, designing and evaluating technologies as products, their usability and immersion into the social contexts of users. We will study contextual design as a field that emerged in response to the challenges of designing for context and usability. Another important strand in this course will dwell on the sociological aspects of HCI and explore the ‘mediation’ of technology use by a range of contextual situations: socio-cultural obligations, habits, values, infrastructure, material objects and not in the least family, kinship and human bonds.

Gender and its construction require specific forms of negotiation and understanding. Social mores determine the identities and meanings surrounding the practice of gender. This course aims to introduce students to the ways in which gender and it construction works in social practices and ideas. Specifically, the course seeks to engage with ideas of masculinity, femininity, and the ideological frames within which they are set. The course also looks the concept of intersectionality, and the ways in which gender interacts with other social practices and structures.

Sustainability, Sustainable living, Sustainable development, these are now buzz words commonly used in everyday discourse. This course aims to unpack these seemingly self-explanatory terms and probe in-depth what it actually means to talk about sustainability. We will place the debates and arguments about sustainability within the larger socio-cultural contexts and explore how different peoples, places, and cultures might approach the issues involved, as they impact on both environment, and livelihoods. A major part of the course will be hands-on experience looking at various issues that pertain to sustainability, within the campus, and in the nearby areas.

This course will apply concepts and theories from resilience research into practice in everyday life. Resilience research uses the positive psychology framework to understand how some individuals display positive adaptation despite adversity while others succumb to similar circumstances. The four waves of resilience research will be presented to introduce key concepts, landmark studies, and theoretical perspectives in the area. Application of research findings in everyday life will be discussed with reference to different challenges, protective mechanisms, and outcomes of positive adaptation. This will be achieved through the exploration of case studies and available literature.

Personality Psychology addresses questions about how individuals develop characteristics that make them unique from each other, why they act and behave the way they do, historical issues and controversies that personality psychologists have encountered, techniques used in assessing personality, and how the study of personality psychology maybe applied to everyday life. This course will introduce the students to some of the most prominent personality approaches. Since the organization of personality is a complex one, shaped by many influences such as genetics, environment, and internal conflicts, one may recognize that there is no one approach that would present an integrated picture of human personality. The aim of this course is to provide an overall perspective that includes a multitude of factors in understanding personality. This would help in application of concepts from personality psychology for both personal development as well as in understanding others.

This course introduces students to literary texts, films and graphic narratives that explore the relationship between Aritificial Intelligence and humanity. Problems of ethics, subjectivity, and ontology will be central to class discussions.

Talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widespread in the contemporary moment globally. AI is projected as the solution to a very wide range of societal issues, ranging from large-scale automation to enhanced informational capacities that can support a broad array of governance, financial, and ecological functions. Governments and industries world over, therefore, are devising policy frameworks to facilitate and reap the benefits of an AI-ushered 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). At the same time, there is also significant concern about the social, political, ethical, and economic consequences of AI. Examples of these include the threat of widespread unemployment, threats to individual privacy, and heightened inequalities because of algorithmic and other biases (inadvertently) coded into the technology itself. In this course, we will examine some of the most salient questions posed by the rapid incorporation of AI technologies into our everyday lives and some of the ways different stakeholders are responding to these emerging challenges. The course will expose students to a broad variety of societal debates in relation to AI.

This course will explore the cognitive significance of natural language for AI (Artificial Intelligence) by tracing the foundations of the relationship between natural language and AI to Alan Turing's work. The central questions to be addressed are: (i) what is the cognitive significance of natural language? (ii) why and how is it relevant to the foundations of AI? (iii) what models of natural language hold cognitive significance for AI?

This course will present concepts, theories, and research findings in the area of psychopathology and highlight factors influencing mental health. The history, background and contemporary viewpoints on psychopathology from biological, psychodynamic, sociocultural, and cognitive perspectives will be introduced to students. Keywords relevant to the area such as dysfunction versus deviation, psychiatry versus psychology, neurosis versus psychosis, symptoms, syndromes, and disorders will be discussed. Clinical criteria for mental health diagnosis will be presented along with a brief overview of assessment and treatment. Finally, outcomes of mental health care such as the display of optimal functioning despite symptoms will be discussed through the exploration of case studies and available literature. Overall, this course is expected to improve the general understanding of mental health including the addressing of popular myths and misconceptions related to mental health and psychopathology.

This course will introduce students to key concepts and ongoing debates in the academic discipline of disability studies. Although issues of impairment and disability are often approached through medicalized discourses, recent scholarship in disability studies has questioned the normative assumptions about ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ bodies and minds that underlie the medical paradigm of disability. Social science research on disability from anthropology, sociology, psychology, gender studies and the humanities has emphasized disability as an experience that is constructed and produced through historical, social and political contexts. Through engaging with this scholarship, as well as through active class assignments and projects, students will develop a critical approach to issues of diversity and disability.

This course aims to introduce students to the ways in which economies, often situated in discourses around markets and exchange, come to be represented in anthropological and sociological understanding. Our aim is to engage in the understanding of markets and economies as human elements that involve social change and conflict. Away from the understanding of purely economic terminology, this course aims to bring into focus ideas such as those of the commodities, marriage exchange, gift-giving and other elements of eco-social dynamics.

Why does poverty persist amidst economic development and prosperity? Why has economic inequality exacerbated with increasing affluence? To address these questions, this course will introduce students to key ideas, concepts and debates in the study of poverty and inequality. The course will focus on the measurement of poverty and inequality, and examine the relationship between poverty, inequality, growth and development, particularly in the context of globalization. It will approach inequality from the lens of well-being and justice, and draw on diverse country experiences to offer a comparative perspective to address the complexities of poverty and inequality.

This course will look at how the discipline of Anthropology explores our understanding of ‘media’. It will focus on the ways in which anthropologists have studied in depth through long term research, called ‘fieldwork’, various forms of media- such as radio, film, television and internet. The readings for this course will impress on the cross-cultural from different parts of the world. Audio-visual resources will be widely used in lectures and class presentations.

This course is keen to map the importance of studying population and demography in the context of its social framing. This means investing a more robust study of what exactly demographic figures and statistics involve. Beyond numbers, demography and population is about people, and that remains the core focus of this course.

The aim of this course is help students learn communication basics in the English language. This includes specifically writing and discussing basics such argument construction, writing structure etc.

The course aims to provide effective ways to develop soft skills to engage in more productive professional development.

This course is keen on exploring the ways in which time is socially framed and performed. In its social form, time is multiple and conflicting, emerging as forms of temporality. Time also emerges as a cultural artefact where people actively subvert and submit to its control and power.

This course attempts to introduce students to classical and contemporary approaches in urban sociology. The course would trace the deployment of the city in the understanding of modern life in varied historical contexts. Students will be introduced to several ways of looking at the city and its inhabitants and understanding the social processes that constitute urban institutions and identities. The course is organized in five modules, each of which will focus on one central aspect of urbanity – its origins, character, culture, production and inequalities. Classroom pedagogy will be interactive, discussion oriented and driven by visual, literary, archival and media sources. Lectures will be complemented by readings.

The course intends to introduce sociological ways of thinking about sports to the students by highlighting the structural, institutional and relational dimensions that influence its organisation and promotion in the contemporary world. Organised around eight themes, the course will introduce discussions around the central axes of culture, inequality, communication and capitalism that dominate the practice of sport in its various forms. The pedagogy will consist of discussion - style lectures organised around visual/audio or archival resources, complimented by academic and long-form reading material for each module.

There are several film theories which have dealt with how the films have been portraying women in the films. Some have argued that the films are basically a male enterprise which portray women in patriarchal terms and some argued that there is a way to negotiate with these male terms and come up with a better ways and methods to improve women’s portrayal. These theories range from psychoanalysis to postcolonial and the course will introduce some of these important developments in the feminist film theory which are introduced from 1970s onwards.

Cognitive Science has raised fundamental questions about what the structure of the world is and how we perceive it, and how we make decisions and act in the world. This course covers introduction to building blocks of cognition which will include sensation, perception, sense of causality, time perception, reasoning, decision-making, language, and action. Reading materials discuss background of each concept and current advances in different fields of Cognitive Science.

Decision making is a ubiquitous part of our daily lives and we all make choices as a consumer on everyday basis. This course will offer a sneak-peak of processes underlying these decisions and choices. How do we attend certain types of information, how do we combine information from different sources? How much of these processes are unconscious? This course will provide an introduction of basic mechanisms and methods in the field of consumer neuroscience.

Designed for undergraduate students of literature, this course provides an introduction into the nature and functions of literature across cultures throughout the world. It provides an overview of the major genres of literature with emphasis on techniques of understanding, evaluating and interpreting fiction, poetry and drama. It also helps the student understand the art of rhetoric and argument formation with the help of literary narratives.

The main aim of this course is to provide a basic understanding of Economics. The course will cover micro economics topics such as the theory of households making consumption, the theory of firms making input choices and output decisions and different types of market structures that these firms operate and Government policies to deal with market failure. Then in the second part of the session, the course will cover macro economics topics such as inflation, unemployment, balance of payments. Fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policy will also be examined. The course will improve student’s abilities to evaluate views and opinions related to economics and develop their own perspectives based on sound reasoning.

This course explores various literary genres that constitute popular fiction. Through select representative texts of science fiction, fantasy/children’s fiction, detective fiction, thrillers, horror and satire, this course intends to familiarize students with the basic features of popular writing and literature. Students would be trained in discussing and responding critically to both literary texts and their screen adaptations while analyzing how such narratives address complex cultural phenomena.

The aim of this course is to understand the Indian economy in development perspective. The objectives of the course are to provide a detailed understanding of the basic features of Indian economy, role and need of planning strategy, regional development, fiscal policy and tax structure of the economy, and Indian budget. The course not only gives an idea about the overall structure of Indian economy but also helps the students to use the ideas for making any decision pertaining to business cycle.

This course focuses on two broad aspects of Telugu poetry. One is its evolution and history from social reform/nationalist times to the present and the other dimension is its shared similarities with the English poetry written and produced in some of the other postcolonial nations. Broadly, the objective of this course is to understand several important trends in the colonial and postcolonial cultural politics through the study of Telugu poetry. Telugu poetry is applied as a kind of connecting link to understand major cultural phenomenon happening through poetry. This specific vernacular poetry is opted because it is less informed unlike its Indian-English counterpart and thus likely to serve as better site of study than the over-studied latter one.

This course is designed to create a strong foundation in macroeconomic theory and policy and its applications to economic problems. The course objectives are to provide a complete and comprehensive analysis of fluctuations in national income, output, and employment within the classical and Keynesian frameworks. The course also discusses various policy options and the extent to which these policies can affect the level of output and unemployment in the economy. Topics covered: National Income Accounting, Money and Inflation, The Open Economy, Economic Growth, Economic Fluctuations, Tradeoff between Inflation and Unemployment, Stabilization Policy, Government Debt, Business Cycle.

The aim of this course is to put industrial economics into a practical context, to analyse policy issues arising in industrial economics, and to develop an understanding of policymaking in this area. The objectives of the course are to provide a detailed analysis pertaining to different types of industries that exist in the real world. This analysis covers the broad area of market structure, conduct, performance and policy implication. By end of the course students should gained a good understanding of application of industrial economics to real world issues.

This course is designed to provide a practical view to statistical methods in the area for econometric modeling and forecasting. This course is taught primarily through lectures and assignments. The course is essential for predicting future trends and, thereby, for planning and business decision making processes. The assignments provide you with a hands-on experience in the area of econometrics and forecasting for handling uncertainties inherent in matters related future outcomes. Forecasting is essential for market analysis, investment decisions, resource planning, financial projections, meeting market requirements in terms of expectations of future sales/trends.

This course will address some of the fundamental problems in cognitive science from a linguistic angle. Some of the questions that will be raised and discussed are: (i) how is language represented in the mind? (ii) what is it about the nature of representation that it can mediate between language and the mind? (iii) what do linguistic structures reveal about the mind, and vice versa? and (iv) how do operations on linguistic structures relate to issues in computation?

This course will explore the territory of linguistic semantics and probe into the problems of linguistic meaning. The central questions to be addressed are: (i) how is meaning represented in natural language? (ii) why is there meaning in language at all? (iii) how can we represent meaning? and (iv) is meaning in language related to mental representations?

This course is a theoretical introduction to gender, and the primary debates within the field. With a focus on sociology, anthropology and development studies, this course aims to introduce to some key themes within gender studies from the perspective of their applicability and understanding.

This course is designed to create a strong foundation in macroeconomic theory and policy and its applications to economic problems. The course objectives are to provide a complete and comprehensive analysis of fluctuations in national income, output, and employment within the classical and Keynesian frameworks. The course also discusses various policy options and the extent to which these policies can affect the level of output and unemployment in the economy. Topics covered: National Income Accounting, Money and Inflation, The Open Economy, Economic Growth, Economic Fluctuations, Tradeoff between Inflation and Unemployment, Stabilization Policy, Government Debt, Business Cycle.

The aim of this course is to put industrial economics into a practical context, to analyse policy issues arising in industrial economics, and to develop an understanding of policymaking in this area. The objectives of the course are to provide a detailed analysis pertaining to different types of industries that exist in the real world. This analysis covers the broad area of market structure, conduct, performance and policy implication. By end of the course students should gained a good understanding of application of industrial economics to real world issues.

This course is designed to provide a practical view to statistical methods in the area for econometric modeling and forecasting. This course is taught primarily through lectures and assignments. The course is essential for predicting future trends and, thereby, for planning and business decision making processes. The assignments provide you with a hands-on experience in the area of econometrics and forecasting for handling uncertainties inherent in matters related future outcomes. Forecasting is essential for market analysis, investment decisions, resource planning, financial projections, meeting market requirements in terms of expectations of future sales/trends.

This course foregrounds the need to incorporate the question of social justice, which has largely been missing in mainstream psychological thought. Drawing on recent work in the critical and discursive traditions in psychology and allied disciplines, this course will train students to examine and analyze contemporary theory and research in psychology from a critical lens. These critical traditions emphasize that the theories developed in psychology are not merely objective and neutral academic constructs but are produced in sociohistorical contexts. Taking examples from research in mental health and gender, this course will foreground the need to engage with local voices and contexts in order to address development issues (especially related to health and gender) in the Global South.

This course would cover the different quantitative and qualitative research methods used in different disciplines in the social sciences. In teaching ‘research methods’, the aim of this course is to train students to understand the philosophical and epistemological bases of qualitative and quantitative methods. The aim of this course is not just to provide information on the different quantitative and qualitative research methods in the social sciences, but to enable students to make informed decisions when employing these methods and techniques. In carrying out social research on development issues, context and culture become crucial, as this course will illustrate, with examples. The course will be exercise-based, with emphasis on the application of the learnings to actual small studies done by students.

This course aims to study the ways in which medicine, its practice, institutions and its principles are enmeshed in social relationships and structures. Drawing from an existing and emerging engagement in the field of science, technology and society studies, medical anthropology and psychology this course introduces students to the ways in which medicine and its practice comes to be marked by social negotiations. The course brings together disciplinary conversations in Psychology and Anthropology to reflect upon clinical practices surrounding health and other aspects of the body.

This course aims to familiarize the student with varieties of methodological and technical approaches to communication in English language. The course proposes to develop skills such as oral and written presentation, argumentation, composition, and technical reporting in students. Further, it seeks to help the student learn effective strategies and skills for academic and professional written and oral communication.

Various forms of media have now become an integral part of our lives. In understanding the world of ‘development’, understanding media therefore becomes crucial for professionals working on development issues. This course will look at how media and communications intersect with the development discourse. Through ethnographic examples from different social sciences, this course will take students through the ‘media industry’ and the way ‘development’ is portrayed and becomes an object for media analysis.

Historically, science and technology, as key indicators of “progress,” have been closely associated with ideas of development. Sciences of classification, including anthropology, botany, and zoology, for example, played a crucial role in legitimating an understanding of colonial subjects as less civilized than their colonizers. Infrastructural technologies such as those of large-scale irrigation projects and the railways, in turn, were key in consolidating colonial empires—both, as territories and as imagined geographies. Sciences such as economics and demography were similarly crucial to articulating geo-politics of the post-World War era. Postcolonial developments have also been articulated through dependency relations of technology transfer from industrially advanced countries of the West to the rest of the world. Contemporary knowledge societies also continue to define and value themselves, in important ways, through their scientific and technological advancements. This course surveys the role of science and technology in how development has been historically defined and practiced. It also looks at how science and technology have been enrolled in resisting imperial designs.

This course looks at the mechanisms that operate in creating a global rhetoric around politics and human rights. The aim is to introduce students of Development Studies to the bureaucratic and international mechanisms in place in relation to the conversation on borders and social demands emerging from crisis situations. The focus will be on studying the ways in which relief activities, and the identification of afflicted populations is part of the international geopolitical processes that mark engagements in times of conflict, epidemics and natural calamities.

This course starts with an overview of comparative development across the various countries in the world. It then introduces the models of growth which helps in exploring the determinants of economic development. It further introduces the concepts of inequality, poverty, and the structural characteristics of development. It then moves on to discuss the demographic evolution during the process of development. In the end, it will focus on the structure of markets and the associated problems of these markets in the developing countries.

The course will familiarise students to questions of social inequality and justice in the specific context of development initiatives and policies in India. Divided into four modules, the course introduces students to historical and contemporary conceptualisations of both inequality and our efforts to address it. This will be achieved through an evaluation of social structure, state interventions and popular action in the case of scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and religious minority communities in India using a variety of academic and popular sources. Gender is woven in as an overarching dimension of inequality across all modules. Pedagogy is lecture and discussion based with well-defined readings and material for each class.

This course starts with the assumptions of the classical linear regression model. It then discusses the basic properties ordinary least squares estimator. It further discusses the implications of the relaxation of the various assumptions of the classical linear regression model. It moves on to the discussion of selection bias that typically arises in impact evaluation studies. It then discusses the role of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to address the issue of selection bias. In the end, it introduces the tools such as Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation, Differences-In-Difference (DID) and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD).

This course would cover the different qualitative research methods used in different disciplines in the social sciences and particularly within psychology. Students will learn the philosophical and epistemological bases of qualitative and quantitative methods and when to use quantitative and qualitative methods. The course will be exercise-based, with emphasis on the application of the learnings to actual small studies done by students.

Students who wish to conduct independent research in their area of interest may register for this course. Independent Project should be completed under the guidance of a faculty member. The aim of this course is to provide students with an opportunity to explore their research interests and to learn how to design and conduct an independent study. Evaluation will be based on presentation and submission of a written report. The student must get the concerned faculty member’s consent before registering for this course and complete it with three contact hours per week.

Health psychology studies the social, cognitive, behavioral and emotional factors that influence health, illness and well-being among individuals. This course will introduce different approaches to health in the social sciences, especially health psychology. The course will discuss advanced topics in health psychology, such as health behavior change models, relationship between chronic illnesses and psychological outcomes, perceptions of illness, health promotion and risk prevention. The course will describe new approaches in research in health psychology which shape the way the field is progressing today, e.g., salutogenic research, mixed-method approach for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions, multi-cultural comparison studies.

Self study should be completed under the guidance of a faculty member. The student is required to choose a topic of study and work on it with the course instructor for three contact hours per week. This course may involve research, reading, or fieldwork experience which is preferably geared towards the writing of the final dissertation. The evaluation criteria will be set by the concerned faculty member. The student must get the concerned faculty member’s consent before registering for the self study course.

This is for Semester III students registered in the M. Phil. program. The student is required to work on a research proposal in the summer months between Semester II and III. This proposal is to be presented before the M. Phil. Evaluation Committee in Semester III.

The course looks at theories on culture spanning from the 19th century to the contemporary times. Different schools of thought from subaltern studies and post-colonial theory will be introduced. The major discourses from Indian and Western thought will be introduced to the student with the expectation that s/he comes up with his or her own analysis. Western and oriental theories and their major critical trajectories are the main focus. The theory and philosophy of Stuart Hall, Patricia Hill Collins, Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will be elaborated on to provide a strong foundation in cultural theory for students of humanities and culture studies.

This is for Semester III students registered in the M. Phil. program. It involves literature review, data collection and analysis as part of the thesis writing process.

This course explores the ways in which social and cultural factors determine experiences of health and illness. A cross-cultural perspective of health issues at various levels- household, locality, nation-state and global, will be explored. Development of medical anthropology as a field, and various theoretical frameworks that have shaped research in the last few decades will be studied. Through ethnographic examples, the course will enable students to understand the debates and discussions within medical anthropology, and draw connections to the larger debates in anthropology itself. Topics covered will include medical pluralism, increasing medicalisation of health conditions, impact of gender on health, and new medical technologies.

Designed primarily for postgraduate students of literature, this course examines complex aspects of contemporary literary criticism and theory. Readings include key texts of literary theory from Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, cultural studies and postcolonial studies. While this course analyzes the various modes of interaction between literature, culture and society, it also provides a basic understanding of concepts, techniques and vocabularies used in contemporary literary analysis.

Positive psychology is a relatively new approach that focuses on positive psychological aspects as opposed to the clinical/psychopathological perspective of traditional psychology. This course will provide an outline to the basic concepts of positive psychology emphasizing specifically on happiness and strengths. The focus will primarily be on one’s understanding of happiness and journey towards it. Answers to the questions raised, will be discovered through an integration of theory and research findings in the area. Relevant concepts will be introduced and their relation to happiness will be examined. These include character strengths and virtues, post traumatic growth, resilience, and positive relationships. Strategies in achieving a state of subjective well-being and meaningful life would be explored.

This course will introduce the students to socio-cultural perspectives on contemporary India. Through ethnographic readings from books and journal articles, the aim is to cover the following topics: caste as a system and ideology; relationship between caste and class; the middle classes and consumption; agrarian issues; industrial labour; urbanization; transnational migration; globalization; environment and development; media depictions; gender identities; education and employment; inequalities in access to resources.

This course explores key Modernist writers including: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, EM Forster, DH Lawrence, WB Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, TS Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, HD, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and David Jones. We will explore these texts in relation to key trends in Modernist philosophy and the visual arts.

This is an advanced level course in psychology that is focused on training students to examine and analyze contemporary theory and research in psychology from a critical lens. Critical psychology emphasizes that the theories developed in psychology are not merely objective and neutral academic constructs but are produced in sociohistorical contexts. A re-reading of the history of psychology is required in order to understand the biases and assumptions that have subtly guided the development of the discipline. Alternate newer paradigms that are popular in contemporary research will be discussed, with illustrative cases from research studies. \\ Course Content : \\ What is critical psychology?; History of psychological thought (positivist and post-positivist); Limitations of mainstream psychology research and theory; New paradigms in psychology from critical perspectives; Critical studies in health, illness, emotion, identity, development; Feminist psychology; Case studies of contemporary critical research in psychology; Importance of doing socially relevant research in the Indian context

This course will take a look at theoretical developments in social anthropology from the 19080s, especially after the publication of the book 'Writing Culture'. By looking at some of the recent work by great scholars in the field, the course allows students in social sciences and humanities to grasp more recent developments in the field, such as the focus on discourse, power, governance and citizenship, globalization, and the public sphere. This will be a seminar-style class where students are required to read ethnographies by reputed scholars, and participate in class discussions. They will write two papers, a mid-term and a final paper, which will long essays on topics chosen by them in consultation with the instructor.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to major issues in international finance and provide an analytical framework for addressing those issues. The course mainly focuses on the issues related to exchange rate policies, trade integration, capital flows, global imbalances and financial crisis. At the end of the course, students will be able to address the issues in international finance from a research perspective.

One of the primary objectives of behavioural Sciences is to understand behaviour in controlled situations. Behavioural sciences rely heavily on quantitative research methods. Quantitative research methods are extensively used in studies in behavioural sciences. This course will help research scholars get an in-depth understanding of different quantitative research methods and the basic assumptions behind those methods. Topics covered: Introduction to Quantitative research methods, Different types of data, Ethical issues in behavioural research, The research process, Defining the research problem, Research and theory building, Experimental method, Survey method and questionnaire design, Research Designs, Determining the sample size, Sampling techniques, Measurement and scaling, Descriptive and univariate statistics, Multivariate analysis.

This course examines how America’s national and cultural identity in the mid-nineteenth century was constructed largely by the literature and ideology propounded by a group of intellectuals from New England who were famously called the Boston brahmins. By reading how this group, comprising of names such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne among others, exchanged dialogues with European literary canons and strove to define a new identity that celebrated individualism, egalitarianism and progressivism as the guiding principles of the new world, this course proposes that nineteenth century literature has a profound impact on the national identity of America. By exploring some of the most famous literary works of this period, this course attempts to establish how the transcendentalists have not only played a significant role in upholding the concept of American exceptionalism but also influenced the cultural and political transformations that define contemporary America.

This course brings together select works of American fiction from the post-world war ii era to the present times. It traces the changing sensibility and formal development of the American novel through the last century while taking into account the historical and socio-cultural factors that have shaped contemporary American writing. The course is designed for research scholars in literature who are expected to closely read select fictional works while using critical theoretical concepts associated with race, gender, subjectivity, textuality, sexuality, narratology, ecology, history and culture in their textual analysis.

This couse explores European aesthetics from Kant to Post-Structuralism. Key thinkers include: Burke, Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Benjamin, Adrono, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Jameson, Cixous, Derrida, Lyotard, Riley, and Bulter.

This course is designed to provide a practical exercise to advance econometrics tools that have been used in economic research. This course is taught primarily through lectures and presentation by students. The course is essential for a research scholar in economics to integrate their research objectives with the advance models to obtain robust outcome. The course topics include - Review of basic econometrics - Pooling cross section and time series data or Longitudinal model - Fixed and Random effect model - Dynamic panel data model - Binary response models: Logit, Probit and Tobit - Stochastic production frontier model - Quantile Regression - VAR Analysis - Cointegration and Error-Correction Models - ARDL model - Modeling Volatility: ARCH and GARCH Processes

The aim of this course is to provide an in-depth understanding of modern macroeconomic theory with empirical support. The course discusses various macroeconomic models such as the Solow growth model, infinite-horizon and overlapping-generations models, new growth theory, microeconomic foundations of incomplete nominal adjustment, inflation and monetary policy, budget deficits and fiscal policy.

This course is an advanced level course that deals with the interface of culture and psychology in everyday life, focusing in particular on the area of mental health. Traditionally, theory and research in clinical psychology focusses on mental health from an individual biomedical perspe4ctive. The aim of this course is to emphasize that mental health and illness can never be studied solely in abstraction but have to be understood in relation to sociocultural contexts. Thus,even something as personal and private as the ‘self’ is located in a web of social reality. Readings will include contemporary research in transcultural psychiatry, cross-cultural psychology, and cultural psychology. The focus will be on understanding the cultural variations in manifestations of mental illness, with specific emphasis on South Asia in general and India in particular. Illustrations will be taken from studies of healing systems across cultures. Finally, students will learn about the skills in cultural sensitivity in practice.

The objective of this course is to provide students with a sociological perspective on the set of processes commonly referred to as ‘globalization’. It will look at the ways in which social and cultural factors affect attitudes to family and kinship, education, employment, labour practices, migration, media images, and gender ideologies. Through in depth study of ethnographies from different parts of the world, the course aims to educate students on the effect of globalization processes in people’s daily lives.

This course focuses on the theoretical developments on the discourses of nation and nationalism. Ethnocentrisms in western discourses were exposed due to raising nationalism, disintegration of erstwhile Marxist nations, with formation of European Union, with the growing cessionist movements and also with the ever-growing new claims from historically marginalized communities. Many scholars have from time to time tried to comprehend these complexities. Each time, the scholars had dealt with different contexts and needs. The first generation had to only contemplate with questions like what was nation, what are the elements that embody it, historic inklings of it ranging from language, culture, religion and so on. However, these predominantly western discourses failed to explain nationalist urge in the colonized nations which had never experienced nationalism. Consequently, the native intelligentsia had to come up with their own perceptions. But, interestingly, current postcolonial scholars argue that the versions of nationalism produced by the natives does finally subdue to the broad epistemology (of Enlightenment) of colonialism and western nationalism. The present course tries to grapple with all these broad historical contexts and debates.

This course will look at the formal foundations of linguistic theories that have a cognitive underpinning. The connections between logic, language and cognition will be traced to their philosophical roots. Questions such as the following are of paramount significance: (i) what is the logical basis of linguistic structures? (ii) how does the logical structure of language relate to cognition? and (iii) why does cognition matter to language at all?

This course aims to introduce students to what are chronic diseases and the various factors involved in their management. The course consists of two modules: 1) a theoretical, taught module that includes topics ranging from patient education to supportive care systems (2 credits), and 2) a practical module where students are expected to visit hospitals and conduct a study (1 credit).

With the emergence of the positive psychology movement in 1998, the focus of psychology research has shifted considerably from the pathological model to the strengths model. This has led to several investigations in the area of resilience. This course aims to trace the history of resilience research through discussion of the concepts of vulnerability, risk and protective factors. Conceptual issues and methodological constraints faced in resilience research will be presented. Some of the major resilience theories and research will be introduced, evaluated and critiqued. An outline of current research in the area including contributions by indian researchers, and future directions in the area will be discussed.

The aim of this course is to understand the ways in which ‘culture’, said to be one of the most difficult words in English (Raymond Williams 1976), is expressed and consumed by the people, in popular forms such as music, dance, film and television. The readings for this course will deal with popular culture from different parts of the world- North America, Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Audio-visual resources will be widely used in lectures and class presentations. Assessment will be based on response papers and a research paper based on a topic of student’s choice.

This course introduces research scholars to an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies. Moving beyond 'literary theory' and 'literary criticism,' this course directly addresses the philosophical texts that have been sources for the foundational ideas of literary theory. In order to enable students to approach their research problems with a stronger sense of interdisciplinarity, this course trains them to incorporate insights from a broad range of humanities and social sciences disciplines into their theoretical repertoire.

This course provides an advanced introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The focus will be on different intellectual traditions through which scholars have conceptualized technoscience-society interactions. By the end of the course, students will have developed a broad understanding of different regional, thematic, and conceptual approaches to the study of science, technology, and society. Literatures introduced in the course will include, among others, social constructivism, actor network theory, feminist and postcolonial STS, as well as more regionally focused literatures such as South Asian, East Asian, Latin American, and African STS.

The course aims to engage with the study of the family and its various social configurations. As a fundamental branch within Sociology/ Social Anthropology, the study of kinship and the family is geared towards a more in-depth understanding of how societies exist and thrive. Concepts such as that of marriage, joint and nuclear households, divorce, familial solidarity and many more will be explored in the course.

This course continues theoretical and methodological discussions initiated during the course LA 6120, Advanced Theories in Social Anthropology. Students enrolled for this course will be already familiar with broad transformations in disciplinary orientation in the wake of the “crisis of representation.” This course aims to help students connect these ongoing discussions in the discipline of anthropology to their own research interests, engaging with additional theoretical and methodological texts and frameworks as they relate to students’ particular research projects. Students are, therefore, expected to pro-actively identify literature of relevance for their work in consultation with the instructor. They are expected to actively work on designing their dissertation projects during this course. A key output of this course will be a draft of dissertation research proposals, which students will be expected to present to other students and faculty in an open seminar.

The recent positive psychology movement has brought to attention the importance of humour in the context of well-being. Humour has been regarded as an intriguing part of behaviour by researchers; yet one often fails to acknowledge the functional aspects of humour in our everyday lives. This course attempts to illustrate that humour deserves to be “taken seriously”. The course has been designed to provide students with a scientific understanding of the processes involved in the psychology of humour with the overall objective of linking it to well-being. This course will present discussions from evolutionary, developmental, and social standpoints while introducing theoretical perspectives on humour. Related concepts such as smiling and laughter, application of humour in everyday life, personality and individual differences in humour, and the effect of humour on health will be highlighted. Finally, findings from empirical investigations would be discussed in the process of gaining insight and understanding into humour experiences.

This course is an advanced level course that deals with the complexities and complications in practices of care-giving. The subject of ‘care’ is one that is fraught with ethical dilemmas and challenges, which have been the subject of much attention in the social sciences. Conventionally, ‘care’ has often been reduced to the concept of ‘social support’, which often does not capture the tensions and challenges in everyday care-giving. In turn, social support is relegated to the ‘family’, which is often seen as the natural care-giver. Yet, the family is also the site of contestations and politics, which make the process of care-giving and care-receiving far from straightforward. In turn, people cannot be neatly slotted into roles of ‘care-givers’ and ‘care-receivers’ in an easy fashion. The aim of this course is to emphasize that ‘care’ is a complex activity and process and that any rich discussion of care and care-giving needs to pay attention to the challenges in care-giving, particularly in the context of caring for chronic illnesses and disabilities. Thus, care, here, is focused on in relation to chronicity and disability. Readings will include contemporary studies on care practices, which raise important questions about morality and ethics in the social sciences and anthropology.

This course aims to engage with contemporary scholarship in migration studies. It will do so by critically studying key concepts and theories of migration, and interrogating the relationship between migration and development. Drawing on multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical literature, the course will focus on social, economic and cultural drivers of migration, as well as its consequences for individuals, families, and societies in host and destination regions. In the context of globalization, the course will re-examine the divide between internal and international migration. Lastly, the course will consider the scope and limitations of migration policies in an increasingly mobile and connected world.

This course will introduce students to ideas and concepts in development drawing from the disciplines of economics, sociology and politics. It will emphasise on diverse theoretical approaches to development that emerged after World War II, and the historical and ideological contexts within which these theories evolved. Thereafter, the course would focus on the ‘practice’ of development using empirical studies from the North and South. At the end of the course, students will be familiar with seminal literature in development theory, and be able to critically appraise specific development policies and practices.

This course foregrounds the need to incorporate the question of social justice, in research on mental health and disability. Drawing on recent work in the critical and discursive traditions in psychology and allied disciplines such as anthropology and disability studies, this course will train students to examine and analyze contemporary theory and research in disability and mental health from critical perspectives. In the course, students will read qualitative and ethnographic studies on people experiencing shared suffering in different domains including but not limited to disability, disasters, mental health, social suffering, political violence, trauma, etc. Questions of value and justice will form the bedrock of the course. Readings will illustrate the importance of taking into consideration local contexts and engaging with marginalized voices in order to address development issues in the Global South.

Ecological crises have been a central aspect of social life for the past several decades. In the early 1990s, sociologist Ulrich Beck, in his “Risk Society” thesis, famously argued that risks are better understood as the primary product of industrial civilization rather than its unfortunate side-effects. Sociologist Charles Perrow has similarly argued that in tightly coupled complex industrial systems, accidents should be understood as “normal” rather than exceptional. Since then, both, the acuteness and visibility of environmental crises have become ever-more urgent: witnessed, for example, in growing levels of air, water, and plastic pollution and associated health and ecological effects as well as the increasing frequency of extreme weather events globally. Indeed, many have argued that the current geological era should be rightly understood as the Anthropocene, in recognition of the unprecedented impact of anthropogenic (i.e. human) activity on the earth’s environment. How can we understand the dynamics of the anthropocene? How are the risks and rewards of environmental harm distributed across and within various societies? How do we address the seeming tension between economic development and environmental sustainability that seem to be at the very heart of contemporary socio-political dynamics? What kinds of techno-social infrastructures can help address some of the challenges that the Anthropocene brings forth? This course surveys these and other questions, using Beck’s “risk society” thesis as a point of departure.

The course covers the introduction to theories of learning and memory, how learning shapes our behavior and how we store and retrieve information? Topics include psychological theories of learning, behavioral and cognitive approach to learning. Classical conditioning, Reinforcement learning and Motor learning. Types of Associations, Biological constraints on classical conditioning. Procedures of shaping behavior, Role of reinforcer. Theories of memory, Storage, Encoding and retrieval, Types of Memory, Techniques of testing memory. Localization of memory, Mechanisms of Memory, Memory disorders. Neurobiology of learning and memory, functional network of brain areas involved in learning and memory

This course seeks to introduce the study of industrial labour and its intrinsic role in development to students. The emergence of an industrial workforce needs to be understood through the specific trajectory of the consolidation of both capitalism and state power in India. The interplay of local systems of hierarchy with these forces has resulted in specific patterns, sections and contradictions characterising the Indian labour force. The everyday of the average Indian worker is thus enmeshed in peculiarities that can be most fruitfully understood at disciplinary intersections, which the course attempts to do by drawing from social anthropology, labour history and political sociology. The course introduces central themes in this discussion through five modules, namely (1) Capital, State and Labour (2) Inequality and the Working Class (3) Shopfloor Relations and Labour Control (4) Mobility, Migration and Working lives (5) Welfare, Regulation and Organisation. The pedagogy revolves around intensive reading and lecture-based discussion.

Lyric Theory explores modern and classical theorizations of lyric poetry in conjunction with Anglophone and European lyric poems from Sappho to the present. Space, time, subjectivity, society, and politics are themes around which discussions tend to develop.