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Social Theory: Concepts and Debates

By Prof . Anu Sabhlok   |   IISER Mohali
Learners enrolled: 158   |  Exam registration: 25
ABOUT THE COURSE:

This course introduces the students to thinkers, ideas, concepts and debates that attempt to explain the social world. It deals with both classical sociological and contemporary sociological theory. Sociological theorists have used empirical observations to theorize social relations, behaviour, structures and transformations and this course will provide an overview of these ideas. It will also provide opportunities to students to question, rework and apply sociological theories. It pays particular attention to the spatial turn in social theory focussing on socio-spatial and cartographic concerns and metaphors.

INTENDED AUDIENCE: This course is primarily designed for sociology majors and other social scientists interested in understanding the spatial turn in social theory. It could also be useful as an elective course for those studying science, engineering, architecture, geography and planning. I have been teaching it for a decade to science majors as an elective.

INDUSTRY SUPPORT: Any company that wishes to understand social behaviors, attitudes, perceptions and structures.
Summary
Course Status : Ongoing
Course Type : Elective
Language for course content : English
Duration : 12 weeks
Category :
  • Multidisciplinary
  • Urban Planning Building Services
Credit Points : 3
Level : Undergraduate/Postgraduate
Start Date : 19 Jan 2026
End Date : 10 Apr 2026
Enrollment Ends : 02 Feb 2026
Exam Registration Ends : 20 Feb 2026
Exam Date : 26 Apr 2026 IST
NCrF Level   : 4.5 — 8.0

Note: This exam date is subject to change based on seat availability. You can check final exam date on your hall ticket.

Page Visits



Course layout

Week 1: 
  • The Social- Conditions of Emergence
  • The Sociological Imagination - C. Wright Mills
  • The Spatial Imagination
  • Social Theory: a genealogy
  • Sociological Imagination: Tutorial
Week 2: 
  • Karl Marx- Influences and Trajectory of Thoughts
  • Alienation - From philosophical concepts to social theory
  • Historical Materialism- Marx's method and the movement in History
  • Capital - A critique of Political Economy
  • Capital- Understanding Exploitation, Crises and Primitive Accumulation
Week 3: 
  • Rules of the Sociological Method- Emile Durkheim
  • Suicide: A Sociological Study- Emile Durkheim
  • The Division of Labour in Society- Emile Durkheim
  • The Colour Line ,Double Consciousness and the Veil - W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Situating Gender -Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells and Pandita Ramabai
Week 4: 
  • Ideal Type and value free social science- Max Weber
  • The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism - The calling to accumulate capital
  • The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism - The calling and the iron cage
  • Power, Authority and Domination - Max Weber
  • Debates in classical social theory - Tutorial
Week 5: 
  • Le Febevre: Critique of Everyday Life
  • Le Febevre: Production of Space
  • Spatialising Capital- With David Harvey
  • For Space- Doreen Massey
  • Spatial Imagination Tutorial
Week 6: 
  • Michele Foucault - from Archeaology to Geneaology
  • Michele Foucault - Discipline and Punish
  • Michele Foucault - Governmentality
  • Partha Chatterjee - The Nation and its Fragments
  • Partha Chatterjee - politics of the goverened
Week 7: 
  • Social Reproduction Theory - Feminist Perspective
  • Nancy Fraser - Regimes of Accumulation
  • Dolore Heyden: What Would a Non-Sexist City be like?
  • Arlie Hoschchild: The Managed Heart
  • Social Reproduction Theory - Tutorial
Week 8: 
  • What is Feminist Theory?
  • Standpoint theory: Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins
  • Intersectionality
  • Judith Butler: From Feminist to Queer Theory
  • Judith Butler: Precaious lives
Week 9: 
  • The Frankfurt School: Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse
  • Jürgen Habermas: Theory of Comunicative Action
  • Exchange network and Rational Network Theory
  • Bruno Latour: Actor Network Theory
  • Erwing: Goffman: Symbolic Interactionalism
Week 10: 
  • Piere Bourdeiu: Social reproduction of inequality
  • Ambedkar: Graded inequality
  • M.N. Srinivas: Village as a unit of study
  • Gramsci: Hegemony
  • Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics
Week 11: 
  • Raewyn Connell: Hegemonic Masculinity and Southern Theory
  • Syed Farid Alatas: Sociological theory beyond the canon
  • Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Epistemologies of the South
  • Chandra Talpade Mohanty: Under Western Eyes
  • Bina Aggarwal: A field of one's own
Week 12: 
  • Perspectives on Globalization
  • Perspectives on Climate Change
  • Perspectives on technology, infrastructure and articicial intellegence
  • Perspectives on Care
  • Putting Social Theory in perspective

Books and references

Reference readings:

 Arias, Santa, and Barney Warf. "Introduction: the reinsertion of space into the social sciences and humanities." The spatial turn: interdisciplinary perspectives. Routledge, London (2009).

Bailey, Joe. Social theory for planning. Taylor & Francis, 2025.

Dillon, Michele. Introduction to sociological theory: Theorists, concepts, and their applicability to the twenty-first century. John Wiley & Sons, 2020

Hubbard, Phil, and Rob Kitchin, eds. Key thinkers on space and place. Sage, 2010.

Knox, Paul L. "The social production of the built environment architects, architecture and the post-modern city." Progress in human geography 11.3 (1987): 354-377.

Soja, Edward. “The Spatial Turn.” Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell, 1996.

Small excerpts from the following texts may be used in the lectures:

1. Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Penguin, 1990
2. Weber, Max (translated by Talcott Parsons). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Routledge, 2013.
3. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A study in sociology. Routledge, 2005.
4. Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labour in Society. Free Press, 1997
5. C. Wright Mills. The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, 1959.
6. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. Dover, 1998.
7. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 
8. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.
9. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage, 2005.
10. Addams, Jane. The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements. The Macmillan Company, 1893.
11. Harvey, David. “Space as a Keyword.” Spaces of Global Capitalism, Verso, 2006.
12. Fraser, Nancy. “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review, no. 100, 2016, pp. 99–117.
13. Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Haymarket Books, 2013.
14. Bhattacharya, Tithi, editor. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press, 2017.
15. Srinivas, M. N. “The Social Structure of a Mysore Village.” The Fieldworker and the Field, Oxford UP, 1979.
16. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990.
17. Smith, Dorothy E. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern UP, 1987.
18. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 85, no. 3, 1979, pp. 551–575.
19. Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Permanent Black, 2009
20. Skaria, Ajay. "‘Can the Dalit articulate a universal position?’: the intellectual, the social, and the writing of history." Social History 39.3 (2014): 340-358.
21. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995. (Chapter: “Panopticism”)
22. Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell et al., University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 87–104.
23. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage, 1978.
24. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000.
25. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299.
26. Teltumbde, Anand. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. Navayana, 2018.
27. Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Verso, 2003.
28. Blumer, Herbert. “Society as Symbolic Interaction.” Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method, University of California Press, 1969. 
29. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books, 1959.
30. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1. Beacon Press, 1984.
31. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.
32. Latour, Bruno. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.” Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, MIT Press, 2005.
33. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
34. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
35. Beck, Ulrich. World at Risk. Polity Press, 2009.
36. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222.

Instructor bio

Prof . Anu Sabhlok

IISER Mohali
Prof. Anu Sabhlok is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali. She holds a PhD (dual title -Geography and Women’s Studies) and a MS (Architecture) from Pennsylvania State University and a B.Arch from the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. Prior to joining IISER Mohali, Anu Sabhlok was an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville, KY. Prof. Sabhlok serves as an editor with the international journals Dialogues in Human Geography and Roadsides. She serves on the editorial board of journals Geoforum and Geopolitics. Sabhlok was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Boulder, CO. Her research interests lie in the relationship between spatial relations and social structures

Course certificate

The course is free to enroll and learn from. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and write the proctored exam conducted by us in person at any of the designated exam centres.
The exam is optional for a fee of Rs 1000/- (Rupees one thousand only).
Date and Time of Exams: April 26, 2026 Morning session 9am to 12 noon; Afternoon Session 2pm to 5pm.
Registration url: Announcements will be made when the registration form is open for registrations.
The online registration form has to be filled and the certification exam fee needs to be paid. More details will be made available when the exam registration form is published. If there are any changes, it will be mentioned then.
Please check the form for more details on the cities where the exams will be held, the conditions you agree to when you fill the form etc.

CRITERIA TO GET A CERTIFICATE

Average assignment score = 25% of average of best 8 assignments out of the total 12 assignments given in the course.
Exam score = 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100

Final score = Average assignment score + Exam score

Please note that assignments encompass all types (including quizzes, programming tasks, and essay submissions) available in the specific week.

YOU WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR A CERTIFICATE ONLY IF AVERAGE ASSIGNMENT SCORE >=10/25 AND EXAM SCORE >= 30/75. If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will not get the certificate even if the Final score >= 40/100.

Certificate will have your name, photograph and the score in the final exam with the breakup.It will have the logos of NPTEL and IISER Mohali. It will be e-verifiable at nptel.ac.in/noc.

Only the e-certificate will be made available. Hard copies will not be dispatched.

Once again, thanks for your interest in our online courses and certification. Happy learning.

- NPTEL team
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