The Department of Sociology at Shiv Nadar University (SNU) is establishing itself as a center of research with a growing community of students and scholars contributing to a dynamic research program.
While individual faculty members have varied interests in unfolding contemporary processes – including the study of markets, law, violence, dispossession, citizenship, media, poetics, visual and material culture, and ecology in diverse urban and rural contexts – the Department as a whole emphasizes a critical empiricism that is central to the fieldwork and ethnographic tradition of sociology and social anthropology.
We are also especially committed to exploring the disciplinary processes of ethnographic writing. At the same time, in keeping with the University’s values and intellectual orientation, the protocol and modalities of our research allow for an interdisciplinary engagement at every level of work.
Equally, it is the view of the Department that research and teaching cannot be separated. The research program is therefore central to the University's pedagogic practice and integrated within all aspects of a curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The faculty has built elective courses around their research areas and develop semester-length research workshops, such as Field, Archive, Ethnography, for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and have introduced seminar-based courses that have a fieldwork component.
In addition, the research program generates and builds on our wider departmental program of intellectual exchange, including academic seminars, workshops and conferences, exhibitions, library and archive projects, reading groups, and ongoing research initiatives and collaborations.
At present the department of Sociology has the following Areas of Research:
