Sociology 1- Introduction to Sociology
The first part of this course will deal with the select work of both early social theorists like Marx and Weber and more recent theorists like Raymond Williams, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Edward Said, among others. The second part of this course will examine influential work on the major social institutions in India such as caste, tribe, religion, gender and class. The scholarship surrounding secularism, communalism and nationalism in contemporary India will also engage our attention. In addition to academic writings, we will sample sociologically relevant work from social activists and journalists. Visual texts like documentary films will accompany a few of our readings.
Sociology 2- Sociology of India
The first module of this course will be on the sociology of law and legal institutions in India. Besides examining the impact of colonial rule on the evolution of legal systems in India, we will examine how the existing legal structures function in a society structured by religion, caste, class and gender. The relationship between law and social movements will be considered. A special interest of this course is to scrutinize law as a cultural phenomenon. Perspectives that underline the cultural embeddedness of universalist concepts such as justice and human rights will be discussed. The second module of this course will deal with the conceptual difficulties involved in social science research on India via a discussion of thinkers who have tried to develop alternate analytical frameworks for the study of Indian society.
Law, Economics, and Religion: A Rational Choice Perspective
Course description: Recent years have seen increasing interest in economic analyses of religion, which has led to the emergence of a new domain within Economics, namely, Economics of Religion (EoR). Within EoR literature the Law and Economics perspective is not yet well-developed. This course will engage with two specific issues related to law and religion that have attracted a lot of interest in EoR. In the first part of the course we will look at the issue of disestablishment of state religion. In the second we will engage with the legal-economic interpretation of religious scriptures and norms.
Introduction to Game Theory
This course provides an introduction to Non-cooperative Game Theory. We will discuss static and dynamic games of complete and incomplete information; wherever possible we will engage with socio-legal problems. In the first two lectures we will engage with the historical evolution of the discipline and examine its epistemic foundations. The epistemic discussion will focus on the idea and nature of representation(s). We will also try to understand how model “worlds” relate to the “real” world. In the third lecture we will learn how to build games and also engage with information, knowledge, completeness, perfectness, nature, etc in the context of games. Our direct engagement with games will begin in the fourth lecture. But before that we will quickly revisit basic microeconomics. |
