Department of Sociology

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/3478

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.Sen, SudarshanaStart date: 2020

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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Living Everyday and Studying Everyday
    (Univrsity of North Bengal, 2024-03-31) Sen, Sudarshana
    When we look around us, we find visual images, vibrant and vivid. The experiences we have form the basis of our subjective understanding of these visual images and ways of studying our every day. But when we study these vivacious but mundane, routine everydays that we live it becomes an object and subject of study. In anthropology engaging in experimental forms of writing there ushered in new ways to represent sensory embodied and visual aspects of culture, knowledge and experience. This encouraged the use of other modes and media of representation, including ethnographic film and photography, performance anthropology, and exhibition. Significantly it was during the 1980s and especially the 1990s that, as academics gradually converted their office practices to the use of computers; digital media became an increasingly normal part of everyday anthropological practices of writing and communicating. Within this context, the development of a theory and practice of hypermedia anthropology began to emerge in the 1990s. Since the publication of the first edition of the Handbook, in 2000, methods that go by the generic name of everyday experience methods have matured from the status of promising innovations to standard tools in social-personality psychology. By everyday experience methods, we prefer not to a specific instrument or procedure but rather to a paradigm for studying socialpsychological phenomena as they occur in the ebb and flow of everyday life – to “capture life as it is lived” (Bolger, Davis & Rafaeli 2003: 580). Everyday experience methods offer more than just another methodological alternative; their focus on ordinary, spontaneous activity allows researchers to evaluate theoretical models and hypotheses from a perspective that differs fundamentally from traditional methods. The payoff is a detailed, accurate, and multifaceted portrait of social behaviour embedded in its natural context. This paper shall discuss possible ways on how this can be done.
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    Decoding the Anglo-Indian Woman: Discourses on Rape and Victimhood
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2021) Sen, Sudarshana
    The Anglo-Indian community is recognized as a racial and linguistic minority in India. It also is recognized as a marginal community. This community has a history of over five hundred years and is a part of Indian polity with nominated representatives in the state legislatures and Parliament. An incident of rape popularly known as ‘Park Street Rape Case’ occurred on February 6, 2012 in Kolkata. The survivor an Anglo-Indian woman, Suzette Jordan, later died on 13 March 2015 due to meningitis. The incident created an uproar in the media because the state government had pointed towards the incident as a ‘minor case’ where the victim was labelled as a prostitute. This paper will highlight how the woman of a marginal community was socially harassed by the state, common people and on the social media from the time of incident and even after her death. It will especially highlight on the after currents on social media after Suzette died a natural death. The paper will use opinions posted on the social media on the issue as the bulk of the data with media reports on print and internet versions. The paper will argue how a woman of a marginal community was a victim to multilayered marginalization in the process.
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    Redefining the contours : survey on the new methods used in social sciences
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2020) Sen, Sudarshana
    The two intellectual and scholarly alignments, one with constructivism, logical induction and theory-building and the other related to positivism was reflected and manifest in two differing cerebral discourses. These intellectual alignments were rooted in different domains of philosophy of science reflected through different research paradigms. The result was a deepening divide between scholars who applied either quantitative or qualitative methods in their studies. In the late 1970s an initiative led to the publication of a Handbook of Mixed Methods in the Social and Behavioral Sciences further enriching the long struggle and intellectual reticence to mix differing and opposing philosophical flagships. This paper will take this struggle as a context and explore and analyze the emerging methods and the new philosophical breakthrough in social science researching particularly in the context of the study in everyday life.