The Department of Sociology is committed to fostering critical awareness and a nuanced understanding of contemporary society. We encourage our students to think deeply about what it means to inhabit the world with others, and how these relations affect our selves. At the same time, we understand that our individual and collective modes of inhabitance are constantly changing along with broader historical, social and cultural shifts. As we live through these shifts, we react to them based on our common sense. However, a training in the sociological imagination gives us an understanding of the inter-connectedness of the different facets of life and living.

At the department, our focus is on the contemporary in conversation with established new and classical theoretical and pedagogical traditions. By emphasizing a critical empiricism that is central to the fieldwork, archival, and ethnographic tradition of sociology and social anthropology, the curriculum at Shiv Nadar Sociology, explores intersections, ruptures and continuities that form the essence of contemporary life. The vision of the department is reflected in our research areas centred around ecology and science, ethnographic methods, visual and material culture, law, dispossession, nomadism, music, and contemporary religiosities.

The B.A Sociology (research) degree at SNU offers not only the requirements of taught courses, but offers an opportunity for undergraduate students to write a research thesis. The entire program including the final year thesis, will train and prepare students not only for a career in sociology or social anthropology but also gives them the requisite skills to enter the professional field of development, media, journalism, writing or any other field of work that they may choose to pursue. The SNU Sociology degree combines its theoretical curriculum and practical hands-on training with field visits, workshop style of teaching and student driven classroom discussions. Inculcating care and empathy, the pedagogy at SNU cultivates a B.A graduate student to be a reflexive and grounded individual with a deep and critical understanding of the world and our position in it.

Core Courses: Sociological Theory I ; Anthropological Theory ; Sociological Theory II ; Market, Exchange and Obligation ; Religion and Society ; State and Citizenship ; Kinship and Relatedness ; Field, Archive, Ethnography

Sample of Electives: Life of Law ; Spirituality, Cosmopolitanism, and Consumption ; Concept and Evidence in Anthropology ; Studying Culture, Caste, and Gender ; From Feminism to Queer Studies ; Sociology of Science ; Nomads and the Outside World.