Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.

Shiv Nadar University

A reflection piece on travelling, testing and quarantine during the pandemic.&nbsp;

Sociology

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Society and Culture in South Asia

The Unwittingly Wilful State Subject: Travelling and Testing in the Terrain of Threat

This article is an ethnographic account of a course I designed and taught in my university to mostly non-humanities, engineering and science undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds. In it, I consider the possibility of a pedagogical approach to teach what it means to construct a field in anthropological terms during a classroom based teaching module. I suggest that one can approach the construction of a field within the classroom by using disturbance as a pedagogical tool. Drawing from Anna Tsing’s formulation of “disturbance as an analytical tool” I demonstrate how we can construct a field pedagogically by disturbing the certitude of the known and by reimagining the modes of seeing and hearing the familiar. The ethnographic elucidation of this paper is essentially work produced from this class – images created from within the university, influenced by a question asked by students and accompanying soundscapes produced by students’ themselves – which demonstrates the possibility of constructing a field by, in a sense, hearing images and seeing sounds. &nbsp;