About The Department

At a time when students freshly out of school are anxious about finding the practical, cognitive and moral meanings of their adult lives, and now especially, when they are highly aware of the many crises—in markets, relationships, and the planet at large—within which they must find such meanings, the Department of Sociology at Presidency University cultivates and offers the strong, dedicated and hopeful vision of being ‘Mindfully Social’. Both operative parts of this phrase are committed to being oriented towards the contemporary, while solidly based on canons. In this, our faculty and student research aim to extend geographical, methodological, disciplinary, ethical and intellectual boundaries every day. Our pedagogic designs thus focus closely on the sociology of local cultures and pasts, national histories and politics, and cross-regional Asian antiquities and developments. The ‘social’ learning roots itself in firm anthropological, philosophical and historical theories of the multicultural Global South, while drawing heavily also on established sociological thought. Several compulsory and elective courses are accordingly such that a multidisciplinary alignment develops alongside basic learning in classical Sociology. Such an intellectual direction towards the social also intends to hone an ethical mindfulness, such that, the future citizens of the planet are acutely conscious about racial, gender, caste, and again, ecological and pedagogic justice.

The department has an explicit commitment to blending research with teaching, and unequivocally encouraging original thinking in students. Some of the best practices of the department thus lie in faculty offering optional, sessional, and even innovative core courses which are tuned to cutting-edge contemporary research, and also those with traditional intents. Faculty research and courses thus span across issues of sociological theories, globalization, intellectual histories of Bengal and the world, Indian society, history and sociology, caste, agrarian studies, western and Indian philosophies of the social sciences, religion, performance and embodiment, health studies, childhood studies, death, economic and political anthropology, urban cultures, ethnicity and borderland studies, kinship and family, gender, sexuality and intimate relations, social movements, materiality, object and sensory studies, ecology and climate change. Another best practice is to actively nurture a serious learner-centric teaching approach which culminates in original dissertations at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. There are structural provisions which allow for very close mentoring and tutorials, as well as ample space for independent research, and the department routinely organizes academic events including talks, workshops, and weeklong lecture series which acquaint students with a wide variety of international ideas, institutions, people and methods. Students employ fieldwork and archival research alongside textual readings, and also express with a variety of digitally adept techniques. From their regular course appraisals to research papers and dissertation writing—the main aim remains to enable students to understand and cultivate originality in thought and sensitivity in action, the twin pillars of being mindfully social.

We take inspiration from the foundational figures of Indian sociological and anthropological thought, such as Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Radhakamal Mukherjee, Dhurjati Prasad Mukerji, and Nirmal Kumar Basu, who had multidisciplinary lives as students of the Presidency College, studying English, History, Political Economy, and Geology. Such permeating perspectives deeply influenced a tradition of philosophical and political Asianism and anthropological thought, with specific ramifications for the study of society, culture, religion and architecture. With a similar spirit, and extending disciplinary bridges further, the faculty in our department, with active academic backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, history, economics and cultural studies, and further interests in medical anthropology, biological and geological sciences, and performance, try to stay intellectually buoyant by conducting systematic research with both policy consequences and conceptual implications on a range of issues. These include intellectual global and institutional histories, endangered and artistic local traditions of South Asia, climate change and cultural life, cultures of death acknowledgement and denial, age and its representations, food and other sensory orders, textiles and craftsmanship, gender and religion, cultural and political ethnicity, and caste and other embodiments, among others.

A substantial percentage of students have thus moved to higher studies and teaching in the last fourteen years and been placed in the most reputed global and national institutions, their research being actively shaped through the courses, mentoring, and international exposure. Several other students have joined journalism, public service, and thronged as researchers and consultants in NGOs and companies which work on issues of ecological security, prison welfare, gender, cultural heritage preservation, citizen-centric policy, accountable governance, and market research.

Students, faculty and the department at large thus want to collaboratively contribute to an imminent global citizenship which discovers new bridges between research, learning, and social commitments, the past and future, and between being intellectually honest and ethically nuanced. It tries to make thinking citizens who shall collectively imagine robust new paths for their cultures and others’, for pedagogy, public good, and the planet.