Department of Sociology

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The present Department of Sociology was established as a combined Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology by the University of North Bengal in 1976. Professor Niren Ch. Choudhury, eminent anthropologist, was the first Professor and Head of the Department who provided the leadership in the formative years of the Department.Professor R.K.Bhadra and Dr.Namita Choudhury were associated with him since inception of this department and helped in the process of its development. The bifurcation between sociology and anthropology took place in 2001 and thus the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology was renamed Department of Sociology and a separate Department of Anthropology was established under the Science Faculty. From its beginning the Department of Sociology has been training students for three courses: M.A., M. Phil. and Ph.D. The Department has produced more than 30 Ph.Ds and more than one thousand Masters. Besides the two main programmes the Department invites visiting faculty, from the reputed national and international universities and the faculty of this department visit the universities abroad on visiting faculty programme and for attending seminars/conferences. The teachers of the Department encourage students to take part in academic discussions outside the class-room interaction and encourage them to present papers in seminars/conferences. In recognition of the good work done by the Department the University Grants’ Commission (UGC) has granted the Special Assistance Programme (DRS – 1) in 2007 which has facilitated undertaking a good number of research projects on issues relating to gender question and the problem of ethnicity in the North Bengal region. The Department has been organizing a national level seminar every year on the gender and ethnicity related issues, which constitute the focal theme of the SAP. As a part of the programme the Department publishes Occasional Papers and edited volumes based on the research articles that are produced under different SAP related programs.

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Author: search.filters.author.Roy, SinjiniStart date: 2020

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Living in Care Crisis: The Case of the Urban Middle- Class Elderly in India
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2023) Roy, Sinjini
    For ages, the aged in India lived in the care of their children, grandchildren, other family members, close kin, and neighbours. However, in recent times, especially in the urban middle-class context, a growing number of elderly are made to live lonely lives in their own house or apartment, mainly under the care of hired service providers or in old age homes. In such living arrangements, the elderly, with broken health and multiple ailments, live amidst insecurities, fear of illness and death, the pain of living alone and away from children, who are now dispersed to different places, and so on. They live with the happy memory of living amid close ones and with never-ending longing for their children and grandchildren who live afar. The care crisis, thus construed, is rooted in some radical changes in the life world of urban middle class families over the last two-three generations, especially in the post-Independence period. The modernity-induced rationalization of life, reflected in fertility checks, careerism, and spatial movements of the younger generation, which have grown manifold in the recent decades of globalization, have contributed to this crisis.
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    Empathy: A Rule of Social Relations
    (University of North Bengal, 2022-03) Roy, Sinjini
    In the social science circle, it is widely claimed that modernity and the liberal ideology have brought a high degree of individualism, social differentiation, fragmentation and atomization in societies across the globe. The neo-liberal social order makes life highly competitive and insecure and creates new social hierarchies while promoting fetishized consumption, a false sense of consumption-based happiness while adding wind to the process of atomization. The inevitable casualty of this is the erosion of the collective social spirit based on fellow-feeling and attrition of compassion or empathy for the fellow members. Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Claude Levi-Strauss and many other social scientists have lamented this turn of events and given a call for rediscovering “pity” or “empathy” in social life and social management. Many social scientists are now echoing this need of the hour while drawing support for their discourses from the Buddhist philosophy and streams of modern Western philosophy. Broadly, the discussions on empathy or compassion as a social rule encompasses the question of morality and humanism in social praxis. This paper is an attempt to understand how empathy is conceived by some philosophers and social scientists and how it works in different shades in the life of the modern middleclass people in the urban Indian context.
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    Empathy and Embeddedness in Social Science Research: The Contrasting Methods of Malinowski and Elwin
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2021) Roy, Sinjini
    Empirical, field-based research in Social Sciences, are neither bereft of empathy (the will to do good to and feel for others) and embeddedness (involving oneself with the process of transformation, while, at the same time, drawing consciousness about it) nor are they obstacles in the way to draw an understanding about social reality. This is the social science tradition that we inherit from Marx and the post-Marxists (the scholars of German Critical School, Gramsci, Althusser and so on), Levi-Strauss, C. Wright Mills, and the feminists starting Simone de Beauvior to Julia Kristeva or Judith Butler. The phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz have taught us how empathy for others’ subjective experiences and cognition is the central component of the reflexive method through which the subjective knowledge can be transcended into intersubjective (hence universal) knowledge. This is in the space of the humanist social science tradition which does not conform to the “scientific” nonnormative methodological tradition popularized by Comte, Durkheim or Weber. In this paper I have discussed about the essences of the “scientific” (read objective) and the empathetic methodological traditions of two noted anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski and Verrier Elwin, which represent two contrasting methods (although one cannot claim that Malinowski never expressed empathy for the native people he studied), and find out if one could strike a balance between the two traditions while highlighting the significance of empathy and embeddedness in field-based research.
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    Significance of “Empathy” in social sciences
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2020) Roy, Sinjini
    Connecting to others, knowing others, and collaborating with others for making society better driven by an endless empathy for others constitute the core of social life and the essence of social science knowledge. This paper explores the significance of empathy in conceptualizing everyday life in three ways: (1) as a method to fieldwork, (2) as a method to sociological knowledge, and (3) as a method to organize and live everyday life. The central argument of the paper is that a detached approach, bereft of empathy, to sociology and life is not only impracticable but also undesirable.