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In conformity with the all-India character of the Department as a Centre of Advanced Study, it admits students to its post-graduate and research courses from all over the country. This includes a fair number of students from the north-east. Additionally, a few foreign students are admitted to its Masters and research courses. A vibrant intellectual environment, encompassing both teachers and students, was painstakingly cultivated by the founding generation of the faculty. This is manifested in several ways that make the Department unique. All teachers, irrespective of their status as Professors, Readers, and Lecturers participate in the academic programs as well as administrative work in the Department through a system of committees. Teaching is equally distributed among all members of the faculty. All of them, including Professors, take tutorials. The Department has a coordinated programme of teaching and research covering a variety of fields, including some developed for the first time in the country.
The Department has been visited by a large number of distinguished scholars from India and abroad, who have delivered lectures and given seminars, some of them as Visiting Professors and Fellows. The faculty of the Department has also been associated with many institutions in India and elsewhere as Visiting Professors and Fellows, and as participants in seminars and conferences. Various members of the Department are members of distinguished professional bodies. They are actively associated with the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and the UGC.
Nature of Research
All members of the faculty are actively engaged in research, which has resulted in the publication of a large number of books, reports, and research papers in different fields of sociology. The fieldwork tradition, as well as a comparative perspective, so assiduously cultivated by Prof. M.N. Srinivas, have been kept alive both by members of the faculty and Ph.D. students. Studies have been published or prepared on community power structures, local-level politics, trade unions, co-operatives, textual and contextual studies of Hinduism, religious symbolism, family and kinship, and social and religious movements. Studies have also been conducted in the fields of stratification, gender, environment, the sociology of development, historical sociology, urban sociology, and medical sociology. The sociology of masculinity, demography, popular culture, education, migration, the sociology of violence and documentary practices of the state are some of the new areas that faculty members are working on at present. The Department has also undertaken several research projects during the last four and a half decades. Several faculty members are involved in international research projects and in preparing surveys of research and teaching in the discipline for bodies like the ICSSR.
The Tutorial System
From its very inception, the Department has encouraged a view of learning in which students are given an opportunity to participate actively in discussions. To supplement the classroom interaction between teacher and M.A. students through lectures, the Department has an active M.A. tutorial programme, which is one of its major strengths. In this system, each student is assigned a tutor who discusses particular topics and allocates reading and writing exercises in accordance with the needs of a student. Thus a student has a continuous feedback on his or her progress. Small groups of students meet their tutor every week for discussion and each student submits one assignment per course every semester.
Since 1994-95 a system of continuous internal evaluation has been introduced, where the marks of one tutorial essay submitted in each course are counted towards the final examination. As attendance at post-graduate lectures is optional, in conformity with university guidelines, to ensure academic rigour by introducing CIE, for which attendance is compulsory. Twenty-five percent of the marks secured by a student in each of the 16 courses studied during the two-year span are based on performance in tutorial assignments. The annual examination in each course carries 75 marks.
The Department has introduced a system of individual advisors for students admitted under the reserved categories. The system is entirely voluntary on the part of both students and teachers. The advisor helps the student by providing individual guidance on books to read, correction of written work, etc.
Seminars and Colloquiums
Both research students and members of the faculty are encouraged to present their research to the Sociological Research Colloquium (SRC), which meets on every working Friday afternoon during the academic session. The SRC is an important institution of the Department to which scholars from other universities both in India and abroad contribute regularly. They have also acted as resource persons for curriculum development in other universities. Other than one or two national and international workshops held in the department every year, two or more Ph.D./M.Phil. workshops are organised in which research. students present their ongoing work to their peers. |
