Sub-fields
Sub-fields
Sociology applied — religion, politics, the rural, the urban.
14 entries
- Demography and Population Studies→The study of population size, composition and change — fertility, mortality and migration, the measures that capture them, the theories that explain them, and the social determinants and consequences that make population a sociological object.
- Environmental Sociology→The study of the relationship between societies and their biophysical environment — the discipline's early refusal to treat nature as sociologically relevant, the competing accounts of environmental harm, and the Indian literature on resource conflict, displacement and the environmentalism of the poor.
- Medical Sociology→The social study of health, illness and medicine — how sickness is distributed along lines of class, caste and gender, how it is experienced and labelled, and how medicine works as a profession, an industry and a form of authority.
- Political Sociology→The study of power, the state and political behaviour as social phenomena — how authority is legitimated, how classes, elites and groups contend for it, and how caste, community and civil society shape democratic politics in India.
- Rural Sociology→The study of rural social structure and its transformation — the village as a social form, agrarian classes and land relations, and the reshaping of countryside life by land reform, commercialisation, migration and decentralised government.
- Sociology of Development→The study of large-scale social transformation described as development, and of the ideas and interests behind that description — modernisation theory, its dependency and world-systems critics, the post-development turn, the capability approach, and the Indian record from planning to liberalisation.
- Sociology of Education→The study of education as a social institution — whether schooling integrates society and allocates talent, or transmits privilege under the appearance of merit, and how access, language and reservation shape the Indian classroom.
- Sociology of Family and Kinship→The study of family, marriage, descent and the household as social institutions — the classical debates over universality, function and origin, the contest between descent and alliance theory, and the Indian literature on kinship zones, the joint family and gender.
- Sociology of Gender→The study of gender as a social structure rather than a biological given — the sex-gender distinction and its later critics, the feminist reconstruction of a discipline that had ignored women, and the Indian literature on Brahmanical patriarchy, invisible work and the women's movement.
- Sociology of Law→The study of law as a social institution — how legal norms are produced, applied, evaded and resisted, how law reflects and shapes social order, and why statutes so often fail to become social facts.
- Sociology of Media and Communication→The study of mediated communication as a social institution — what media do to audiences, who owns and frames the message, how meaning is made in reception, and how the press, television and platforms shape public life in India.
- Sociology of Religion→The study of religion as a social institution — how beliefs and rituals bind groups together, how religious ideas shape economic and political conduct, and how faith is organised, contested and transformed in modern societies.
- Sociology of Work→The study of work as a social institution — how the organisation of labour has changed from craft to factory to platform, how control and skill are contested at the point of production, and how India's formal-informal divide structures working lives.
- Urban Sociology→The study of cities as social forms — how urban density and diversity shape personality, association and community, how urban space is produced by capital and politics, and how these questions look in Indian cities of migrants, slums and enclaves.