Shiv Nadar IoE-SOAS Joint MA Global Urban Sociology

This core module guides students through key sociological concepts, theories, and methods, with particular attention on how global changes from the late twentieth century to the present day can be best understood, explained, and studied.

Using case studies from different countries, it focuses on the actuality of our globalized lives, utilizing local narratives to understand how ‘modernity’ and ‘globalization’ are experienced on the ground. The specific aims are: a)to uncover global forces and connections; b) to highlight and analyse the divisions/inequalities and challenges within our global society; and c) to embed research methods learning in empirical case studies.

The module is organized into three broad blocks: theories, themes and practices. The first block focuses on the interpretations that have been used to conceptualize our increasingly globalized world, encouraging students to critically engage with theories on ‘modernity’ and ‘globalization’. The second block adopts a case study approach to foreground the significance of social science research for the ‘real world’. Major topics -including interracial intimacy, export zones and capitalism, migration, and the crisis of social reproduction - have been carefully chosen in order to familiarize students with a range of sociological concepts such as class, gender, generation, race, power, labour and capital and demonstrate to students how they are applied to ‘real-life’ situations. The final block will provide students with hands-on skills to design and implement their own sociological research projects

Learning Outcomes:

On successful completion of this module students will be able to:

• Understand and synthesize the main theoretical issues and debates underpinning global sociology.
• Understand and construct critical evaluations of various methods and techniques used by sociologists to understand our global society.
• Utilize and develop analytical skills to communicate ideas, thoughts, and comments in a clear verbal and written manner.
• Evaluate their own practice and skills development needs.
• Use theories and methods to design their own research plans.

Assessment:

• Assignment 1: 30%
• Assignment 2: 60%
• Seminar Participation: 10%

Cities are sites of complex and vibrant forms of social, cultural and political life.

Anthropology’s traditional focus on the rural and the small-scale has begun to be supplemented and extended through a focus on urban life as a context in which to understand social processes and relationships under conditions of extraordinary transformations, including localised adaptions to the forces of globalisation.

This module focuses on ethnographic approaches to urban life. With an emphasis grounded in everyday life practices, it explores how urban residents and other inhabitants make sense of their daily social worlds, navigate surrounding communities, and manage the broader forces that structure their urban experiences. Drawing upon urban ethnographies, the module explores economic, cultural and political change in global cities since the late twentieth century and examines the relationship between urban life and different forms of sociality, aspirations and conflicts. Following an introductory session on the urbanization of the Global South, the rest of the module is structured around the lived experiences of particular groups of cities, including children, young people, sexual minorities, migrants, old people and those with disabilities. Key themes, such as space, mobility and inequality, recur throughout the ethnographic analysis.

Learning Outcome

• Demonstrate a critical awareness of the development of urban sociology as a distinctive sphere of social science enquiry.
• Identify, analyze and engage with a range of ethnographic studies on urban life.
• Communicate complex research-based ideas in a variety of media.
• Evaluate their own practice and skills development needs.
• Formulate and articulate advanced, nuanced perspectives on the complexities and intricacies of urban life, drawing from a rich array of sources.

Assessment:

• Assignment 1: 30%
• Assignment 2: 60%
• Seminar Particiapation: 10%

763 Studying (in) the City introduces MA Global Urban Sociology students to key considerations in urban ethnographic research.

 Through a lectures presented by members of the SOAS Department of Anthropology and Sociology on their own field studies of important foci in global urban studies -- e.g., gender, development, institutions, 'race'/ethnicity, religion, leisure, alternative lifestyles, foodways -students are exposed to issues of research design, access and entry, rapport, interpretation, data collection and analysis, and so forth. In this way, students discover the specifics of how ethnographers work, design projects, gather their data, and write about their findings. Through a series of conversational lectures/seminars with members of the department's faculty, guided by the module convenor, students will be introduced to the research process behind each academic’s publications, shedding light on their methods and offering insight into the less-often discussed practicalities and peculiarities of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in an urban environment.

As a core module for the MA Global Urban Sociology, 763 Studying (in) the City offers a unique opportunity to learn from active field researchers, complementing the theoretical concepts and methodological texts presented in 761 Theory and Method in Global Sociology (I) and the ethnographic studies explored in 762 Ethnographic Approaches to Urban Life. Through thematic lectures and direct interaction with experienced ethnographers, including time for discussion and elaboration, students gain a realistic sense of how urban ethnographers undertake ethnographic research and will be better equipped to undertake field studies of their own.

Syllabus

After an introductory class session, the remaining nine weeks of the term are made up of presentations by members of the SOAS Anthropology & Sociology faculty, each discussing their own work and the field research behind it. Presentations are followed by approximately one hour of discussion.

In this module we explore the complex and often paradoxical relationship between place, mobilities and food. We critically interrogate claims made about food system 'delocalisation', 'deskilling' and 'gastro-anomie'. We examine food markets, street foods and restaurants as sites of both cultural production and labour exploitation, of social interaction, cosmopolitanism and open debate, and of social control, surveillance and spatial cleansing. We explore contemporary forms of ethical food activism, including in the digital realm, and consider the complex role of food in migration.

This module combines theory and anthropological case studies to help students develop a critical knowledge of approaches to address contemporary global challenges such as poverty and economic exclusion, migration/refugees, gender inequality, climate change, informality, child labour, health and illness, infrastructure and corporate expansion. It seeks to deepen students’ awareness and understanding of how people around the world apprehend and deal with the pressing social and environmental challenges they face, and the range of concepts and practices enacted to deliver sustainable futures, including international development, corporate social responsibility (CSR), financial inclusion, and social enterprise, entrepreneurship, and innovation. The module invites students to grapple with the contested and culturally-situated nature of these paradigms, and how they are underpinned by forms of economic and political power.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This course will explore these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times. Different theories, approaches, and disciplinary angles will be introduced and discussed. We will also consider what de-colonising approaches to migration and diaspora might look like. By drawing on established and less charted bodies of work on migration studies, diaspora and identity, transnationalism, postcolonial and de-colonial studies the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the emergence of diasporas, the reformulation of 'home' and the simultaneous instability and reinforcement of nation-states.

Theory and Method in Global Urban Sociology II 

to be taught at SNIoE will tackle the question of how the global and the urban as twin concepts align themselves to address the moment of the contemporary. This course will not have sections outlined separately as theory and method but will demonstrate empirically, through ethnographies and other sources, how conceptual frames have been approached methodologically and how particular concepts, drawn from these ethnographies or otherwise, can help us critique and challenge certain universal frames that have often tended to be hegemonic in working with the distinctions between the global north and the south. The course is envisaged along three broad sections. Please note that each section carries a combination of theory and method.

Tracing Genealogies

The first section intends to work with the question of what it means to frame “global” as a concept in the contemporary and how the vector of the urban extends, destabilises, and realigns the concept of the global today. The imagination of a “global south” has been a given, but this course would like to do away with such hegemonic universalism and ask how we can conceptually pitch the argument of a Global Urban instead of the global north or global south to think about modern-day space/place configurations or understand the traction these have and question what is their validity and how to rethink them? This section would then like to trace the genealogy of three key concepts—post-colonial, Decolonial, and Global- from the vantage point of the Sociology and Social Anthropology discipline(s).

The Comparative Urban 

The second section builds on the first to help students understand how the modern-day configuration of the city or the global is not necessarily about comparison or drawing a homology between different empirical sites or locations. Instead, contemporary notions of what constitutes urbanisms, and the current geo-political city could be seen through other dimensions which are alike yet distinct. The intent here is to destabilise the notion of the universal and understand what motivates the relationship between the universals and particulars. We don’t take the current stand of offering vernacular alternates as an alternative to the category of the universals or think about the south or any other location as a radical alterity to any hegemonic universal. This section would like to bring forth for discussion conceptual frames beyond the classical ones tackled in the first section and work with questions of social Infrastructures, atmospheres, and Informalities. 

City in Data

While the first two sections squarely address the conceptual frames for the global-urban in its concrete empiricisms, the third section would work with macro-scales through which the modern-day city is administered, governed, and lived as a functional and affective space. Drawing from a variety of empirical locations, this section will highlight how the contours of mapping, demarcating, and categorising the city yield conceptual frames that mark their potential in understanding the urban. This section will engage with methods of understanding the city through scalar techniques of GPS, GIS, information, and communication and ask how these methods construct newer senses of the urban

Humanitarianisms, a term associated with organized, formal, response to various human crises, long or short term, is a well-established discourse and a distinct area of study.

In either humanitarianisms research or urban research, the city as an arena for humane action or what may be termed social responsiveness, is emerging as a distinct realm. For example, cities struck by crises - ‘natural’ or man-made disasters, or episodes of violence and war, or medical emergencies like pandemics or local epidemics become intense theatres of humanitarian activity. Governmental and non-governmental agents, individual citizens or concerned collectives are the many actors through which a range of practices that attempt to sustain beleaguered lives - from bureaucratically managed aid and relief measures to everyday acts of neighborly kindness - become evident. Faith-based organizations, civil society groups, and even individuals are a significant part of urban spaces where they routinely and regularly provide for the poor, sick, destitute and hungry. Churches, shrines, temples, mosques locate this work as much as other agencies do for the homeless, orphans or street children, destitute women, the elderly and the sick. Cities are often the crucibles in which political activism, social movements and even nascent ‘revolutions’, however ephemeral, find their most visible, dramatic and powerful manifestations. Public squares, city halls, parks and streets stage some of the most impactful events that claim recognition of human suffering and deprivation, human rights and justice, in recent as well as in historical time. 

Underlining the plural version of this range, in terms of both discourse and practice, this course attends to the internationalized vector of contemporary humanitarian interventions. Exploring the encapsulation of response and responsibility in international humanitarian law, understanding specific projects and delving into the concepts that drive humanitarian activity, this course will enable a view of an emerging area that is urgent, dynamic and timely.

Learning Outcomes:

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Construct arguments based on the debates around humanitarian interventions.
• Explain the genealogy of legal humanitarian interventions and how this takes a particular form in the city and compare this intervention to more local interventions such as those based on faith.
• Equip students to work in a range of different international and national level humanitarian organizations.

Assessment: 

• Assignment 1: 40%
• Assignment 2: 40%
• Oral Presentation: 20%

The urban landscape in its diverse manifestations is the most familiar environment to the majority of human populations and will be for generations to come. 

The term ‘urban ecology’ has been used variously to describe the study of humans in cities, of nature in cities, and of the coupled relationships between humans and nature. This has led to scholarly investigations of cities as individual units, some cross city examinations and with the conceptualization of the planetary climate, there has been a re-interpretation of meanings of urban ecologies. Contemporary scholarship problematizes what forms of ecologies compose urban spaces and how they relate to other human and non-human elements.

To bring this out the course will engage with how urban ecologies can be understood through themes that address how urban nature is understood and governed, climate change infrastructures emerge, interspecies formations take place, effects of urban water worlds and how waste comes to matter. Ethnographies will explore these themes in cities such as Manchester, Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Lahore, Lagos, Nairobi and Stuttgart, to name a few. These ethnographies will bring out how prior understandings of the complexity, resilience and innovation in urban ecosystems have fundamentally changed through unpredictable dynamics between cities and their larger environments. By focusing on questions of social experience, the course will ask how ecological issues are shaped by legacies of inequality and injustice; shifting dynamics of power and governance; and culturally specific ideas about nature, culture, and the human.

Learning Outcomes:

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Construct arguments that complicate the concept of urban ecologies and how they are effecting our quotidian lives.
• Conceive of and explain how urban ecologies such as interspecies, climate change, waste and dolphins are significant in the way that our social worlds are being effected and how humans define their future actions and social relations.
• Develop an ability to think critically and nuance understandings of ecological relationships.

Assessment:

• Assignment 1: 35%
• Assignment 2: 40%
• Oral Presentation: 25%

The Commons have been understood either as common pool resources, in how communities collectively manage resources outside the market and state frameworks, or through a radical political inclination of finding alternatives out of capitalism, state and their ensuing effects altogether. 

The commons, both as a resource and practice, a place and process, are theorised through a focus on how we basically manage resources, institutions and peoples. The ‘urban’ as a site of continuous flux and connectivity, diversity and accumulation will be examined through the generative process of claims-making institutions, movements and ideas that negotiate with states, boundaries, enclosures, communities and solidarities through ideas of consumption and value, proximity and density, in the face of, and in spite of, seamless capitalist accumulation and consolidation. Urban commons as a moorage for humans and non-humans alike will take up constructs that concern the world at large, such as the cyber-commons, reclaiming movements, ecological commons, a discourse of rights to clean air, water and shelter with a focus on practices and processes that endeavour to common regulated space and place. The written and visual course material will equip students to reimagine the city and urban spheres into futurity in ways their formalist state-centric planners seldom intended.

Anthropologists have been strong contributors to understandings of conditions and states of being labeled, historically as “madness”, and as “mental disorders” in contemporary parlance.

In conversation with other disciplines - especially the “psy” disciplines of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis - the discipline of anthropology has pointed to the many ways in which people, lay and professionals, experience, categorise, treat, represent and live with mental health issues, in different parts of the world and at different times in history. In doing so, mental illnesses necessarily emerge as not only biological or psychological but as also social. This course situates itself within such longstanding and ongoing debates and discussions. 

In recent times, the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) has called for a united front to address purported issues of mental disorders across the globe. Taking the MGMH discourse as an important “movement” with ramifications for current and future theories of and practices around mental health, the course aims to understand, interrogate, and recalibrate the “global” and “mental health” and their conjunctions. How can “the global” be attentive to the specificities of different “locals”, without resorting to the “indigenous”, in understanding what constitutes “mental disorders” in particular contexts and for specific peoples? Extending this, the space of the urban too is not seen to be a given but a site in making along with and as part of “the local” and the “(mental) disorderly”. Attending to the instability of these categories, it is hoped, will lead to complex questions about a “global” paradigm to mental health, and ask what kinds of questions are made possible by attending to the constant making and remaking of these categories.

Steven Connor’s essay “The Modern Auditory I” (Roy Porter, ed. 1997) provides the basic premise of this proposed course. 

Drawing upon his ideas we can say that the consideration of the modern subject as the subject of production and reception of sound not only counters the proverbial ‘tyranny of the eye’ prevalent in western philosophy, but by following Connor, we can focus on the sonic experience in early modernity through one of modernity’s defining features, the technological innovations. 

The latter, especially allow for exploring the enhancement of the senses, in this case the auditory, through the power of technology and the dissemination of the object of listening through the technologies of reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin indicates. This basic premise guides this course outline in many ways. 

Firstly, the technological innovations related to sound (sound recording machine, telephone, stethoscope) collapse the space-time boundaries, on the one hand, in the inter-subjective realm and on the other, across geo-political spaces by virtue of the fact that soon after their innovation in Europe, they were deployed in far distant spaces of the colonial world for commercial, academic and political purposes thus creating the ‘colonial-imperial-global’ sphere. This historical trajectory is important for building genealogies of the contemporary sonic production and experience. 

In the contemporary world, the sonic experience is thus necessarily international and/or digital-virtual. We can find it in the way people talk to power and assume sonic agency against the bombardment of authoritative diktats (Labelle 2019) or in the song in the Marathi film Sairat, where a live symphony orchestra recorded in L. A. intensifies a ‘semi-urban’ romantic moment.

If urban spaces/cities come into view, first through the structures that house sound technologies (telephone wires/poles, radio wave towers, satellite towers) that surround them, scholars of sound studies describe the urban/city as formed of physical and social acoustics. The openness of the ear and the ensuing multi-directional inputs of sound provides them grounds for building different arguments vis a vis the visual and the visible urban/city. The proposed course can explore these and more directions to understand the connections and disjunctions in a global world

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this course, students are expected to be able to

• Assess and engage with theoretical-conceptual frames for understanding city through the specifics of sounds in the city.
• develop reading skills in ethnographies that focus exclusively on sound and space.
• generate skills in analysing music.
• formulate scholarly essays on innovative topics using all the skills learnt in the course.

Assessment

• Assignment 1: 20%
• Assignment 2: 30%
• Assignment 3: 30%
• Oral Presentation: 20%

The MA dissertation provides a unique opportunity to pursue a long-standing or new interest and/or to explore, in some depth, a topic that is relevant to your anticipated career and/or future research plans.

The 10,000 word dissertation must be submitted by September in the final year of study. The topic is chosen by the student, with guidance from the MA programme convenor and/or dissertation supervisor (who will be allocated early in Term 2). Students should link their topic with themes and concerns raised in the MA programme's core modules, but may also wish to pursue angles of inquiry suggested by option modules that speak to their own particular interests, whether disciplinary, geographic or thematic in focus. There is also ample scope for developing such special interests by taking advantage of the rich calendar of regular seminars and special lectures at SOAS, organised by all the School’s departments and centres