BA in Social Science
An understanding of our social conditions for both critical analysis and transformative action.
The four-year BA Social Science programme at Azim Premji University offers students a broad-based, multi-disciplinary immersion in the study of Indian society — its structures, institutions, and lived realities.
The vision for the major is grounded in the conviction that at a time when our society appears to be increasingly fragmented and fractured, higher education in the social sciences, especially at the undergraduate level, ought to approach the ‘social’ in an integrated fashion.
This requires putting theoretical and methodological practices of the traditional social science disciplines like sociology, anthropology, history, political science, etc., into conversation with each other, such that they best illuminate our social condition for both critical analyses and transformative action.
Accordingly, the BA Social Science curriculum provides students with a wide-angle exposure to the fundamental theories, concepts, and methodologies in the social sciences, cutting across disciplinary boundaries. It trains them to bring this learning to bear on specific objects of social scientific enquiry, especially in the Indian context, through hands-on fieldwork experience. And, in conjunction with the other facets of the undergraduate programme, it develops in them the technical skills necessary for collating and analysing empirical data of both qualitative and quantitative kinds.
Programme Structure
Course Structure
The Common Curriculum will introduce students to the study of the themes and areas that emphasise and build critical and analytical abilities, and sensibilities for dialogue, reflection and cooperative learning. The Common Curriculum has three sub-components organised as below:
Foundations: Build capacity for critical thinking, reasoning and communication.
Understanding India: India’s history, society and possible future.
Creative Expressions
As an essential component of the core curriculum, Creative Expressions courses utilise artistic mediums, sports, and embodied learning to cultivate creativity, foster social cohesion, and build resilience. Encouraging students to take risks in unfamiliar disciplines, these courses nurture curiosity, self-discovery, and overall well-being. Through Creative Expressions, students are empowered to participate with meaningful social connection, fostering a community of active and responsible citizens.
Seeing Like a Social Scientist
Disciplinary Major
What does it mean to understand the world as a student of the social sciences? What kinds of engagement with it does it entail?
Statistics for Social Science
Disciplinary Major
Engage with ‘data’ and its use in understanding and influencing social phenomena
Key Concepts in the Social Sciences
Disciplinary Major
Understanding the key concepts in Social Sciences
Power and Politics in Contemporary India
Disciplinary Major
Introduces the key ideas of power and politics, of institutions, processes and outcomes that shape contemporary India.
Understanding Agrarian India
Disciplinary Major
Focuses on agrarian India and draws students into engaging with the aforementioned issues.
The Caste Question
Disciplinary Major
Explores the structural stratification of society based on caste.
Religion Under a Social Scientific Lens
Disciplinary Major
Understand religion in India today through themes like identity, praxis, and authority.
Advanced Methods in the Social Sciences
Disciplinary Major
Equips with the skills required to understand and engage with empirical research.
Contemporary Issues in Gender and Sexuality
Disciplinary Major
Explores multidisciplinary gender and feminist theories, methodologies and epistemologies
Indigeneity and Belonging in Contemporary India
Disciplinary Major
Understanding the various historical circumstances and the different terminologies of indigenous subjectivity and collective reference used in India today
Modernity and the Discourse of the Social Sciences
Disciplinary Major
Critically engage with the conjoined history of modernity and the social sciences
Students must be prepared for the world of work at the end of the programme should they choose to enter it. We aim to provide the required skills and competencies for this through a Minor featuring courses in an Occupational or Interdisciplinary theme. These sets of courses are aimed to provide both conceptual understanding and skills and tools that will allow students to contribute through work and further study.
Students can opt for a minor in any one of the indicative areas listed below:
- Education
- Media and Journalism
- Data and Democracy
- Sports and Fitness
- Climate Studies
- Arts
The selection of these indicative areas is based on the availability of courses and our evaluation of the student’s interests and academic needs. For each cohort, a final list of available courses will be announced at the end of their second semester.
Students can craft their own educational experience by selecting courses in the following ways:
- Students will have the option to take additional courses in their Disciplinary major
- Interdisciplinary minor that will enable them for their further higher studies or career pathways.
These courses could also be selected to enhance and broaden their
- Language skills and Quantitative reasoning capacities/programming skills
- Understanding of themes outside their Major subject
Explore
Resources & Activities
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Chapter in a Book
Contextualising the Emergence of Dalit Studies in Indian Academia
This chapter provides the emergence and practice of Dalit Studies within academia through a critical engagement with curriculum structures that exist within pedagogic discourses. It explores different kinds of academic writings that have prevailed within Dalit discourse by looking into their composition, engagement with the…
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Article
‘Gaze’ and ‘Bodies’ in popular print: Understanding the changing representation of women in visual culture
The paper attempts to develop arguments around concepts like ‘Gaze’ and the understanding of ‘bodies’ within popular culture. In its discussion on the ‘male gaze’, it raises pertinent questions of ways in which, with the rise of consumerism, the women’s representation, particularly in the popular…
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Article
Revisiting the minority imagination: An inquiry into the anticaste Pasmanda-muslim discourse in India
The article explores the emergent tension between the minority imagination and anticaste politics among India’s most significant religious minority, the Muslims. Since the late 1990s, the mobilisation of lowered-caste Muslims in the form of the Pasmanda movement has increasingly challenged the hegemony of the so-called…
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Article
Pluralisation challenges to religion as a social imaginary: Anti-caste contestations of the Muslim quota in India
Postcolonial democratic deepening brings new challenges to religion as a social imaginary in India. Increasing cultural differentiation and pluralisation are countered by fundamentalisation, but also challenge existing minority/multicultural imaginations. Religion, as the overarching identity category, has come under scrutiny given the politicization of caste among…