Can you provide me the curriculum of the M.A. in Society and Culture – Humanities and Social Sciences Program offered by IIT Gandhinagar?

The Masters in Society and Culture, a unique program conceptualized and implemented by the faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (since 2013).

It has a specific goal of providing to students (from any disciplinary background) breadth and focus in the key disciplines within the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Curriculum

Core Courses: Perspectives in History, Perspectives on Politics, Critical Approaches to Anthropology and Sociology, Perspectives on Indian Civilization, Theoretical Perspectives in Literary Studies, Research Methods in Social Sciences and Humanities.

Literature & Society Track Electives (Indicative): Reading English in English Classical Indian Literature, India Through the Writer’s Eye, World literature and Readings from Bengal, South Asia through Literature.

History & Politics Track Electives (Indicative): History of Modern India (1930-1964) Paradox of Indian Democracy, Social History of Dissent Mobs, Crowds and Citizens: Democracy and Mass Mobilisation in India, Global Poverty and Developmental Aid.

Public Policy and Human Development: Introduction to Demography: Population Measures and Social Processes, Global Poverty & Development Aid, Disease, Health & Inequality, Human Development: Theory, Measures and Policies, Education in Modern India: History, Policies & Process of Reforms, Theories of social epidemiology.

M.A Program Credit Structure
Minimum credits required for graduation is 80. An indicative distribution of course credits is the following. Core Courses (20 Credits), Track/General electives (26 Credits), Summer Internship (4 credits), Electives outside HSS discipline (6 credits), Cultures of Communication (4 credits), Dissertation (20 credits).

The Program has a very flexible curriculum to enable students to design the program according to their preference. For the 2017-2019, 3 discipline specific tracks are:

• Literature and Society: This track invites students to creatively understand and critically engage with literary texts in English as well as Indian Languages across time and space, while reflecting on the fundamental tropes within societies and cultures. With a broad focus on India, the courses offered under this track address some of the focal socio-cultural dualism pervasive in the critical idiom, such as; colonial and postcolonial, classical and modern, regional and cosmopolitan, print and digital cultures, cinema and society, caste and class. The courses encourage students to debate and initiate dialogues revolving around central literary and socio-cultural discourses.

• History and Politics: This track will train students to develop critical thinking in a range of themes and perspectives that fall within the academic disciplines of History and Political Science. Courses in this track have been designed with a broad focus on India, its immediate colonial history and the functioning of the post-colonial nation state and society.

• Public Policy and Human Development: This new track will train students to critically review the contested idea of development using a multidisciplinary lens while examining questions of inter - sectionalise in stratification systems and their interaction with state, market and society. Grounded in critical social science theories, this new track will go beyond the traditional dichotomies of wellbeing, culture, development and modernity and encourage students to think about politics and policy as part of their everyday life. Courses in this track will involve training students in the methodological tools necessary for the practice of social science inquiry ( such as demographic methods; data analytics; human development and impact measurement) as well as an understanding of evidence-based, applied social research (such as education policy; social epidemiology; disease, health and inequality).