| Course Type | Course Code | No. Of Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation Core | SHS3DP403 | 2 |
Semester and Year Offered: Semester 3
Course Coordinator and Team: Dr. Manolagayatri Kumaraswamy
Email of course coordinator:
Pre-requisites:
Course Objectives/Description:
This course familiarizes the students with ‘the Indian rural’ through literature, art, and cinema. The idea is to depict the diversity and multiplicity in ‘the Indian rural’ through various media. From depicting oppression, marginalization, complexity, to representing celebration, happiness, and contentment, the objective of the course is neither to consolidate the rural as a site of marginalization nor to eulogize it. The course aims to dismantle the binary of the rural and the urban as conventional and modern on the one hand, and as idyllic and alien on the other.
It focuses on Practice-as-Research as a methodology drawing on insights from creative practice, art and process work. Through the sometimes messy and amorphous quality of the creative process, it becomes possible to de-‐polarise positions and break down binaries as new ways of experiencing material and thought comes to manifest. While starting points for the research are varied, there is an openness to allow what emerges from the practice to create the framework of the research output. PaR ‘employ variations of reflective practice, participant observation, performance ethnography, ethno-‐drama, biographical/ autobiographical/ narrative inquiry, and the inquiry cycle from action research. The course will also look at the concepts of time, labour, money and value as distinct categories of experiencing a sense of the rural. The focus of sensing the rural through art will also unfold in terms of a working with sensations and embodied experience through creative practice and self-‐reflection.
Course Outcomes:
On successful completion of this course students will be able to:
Brief description of modules/ Main modules:
Session 1: Sensing the Rural: The first session explores how art facilitates as an experience of the rural by highlighting its relevance for understanding the Rural through experience, theory, research, creative practice, self reflection.
Session 2: Introduction to Practice-as-Research: The second module begins with conceptual engagements across the binaries of Knowing and Doing, to trace the emergence of PaR in Academia and in Epistemic concerns etc. It further dwells into the intersections with earlier practice-‐based research methods and traditional qualitative methods to highlight its relevance to immersion experience and Development Practice.
Session 3: Immersion as Sensation The third session deals with workshops and performances of embodied practice as research, role of time, taste, smell, touch, spatial orientation, sound, sight, landscapes and soundscapes in knowing and how they embedded in writing, reflection and thinking.
Session 4: Mediatising the rural : The third module looks at how ICT has changed the ways of archiving the rural by looking at the relevance of media technology as reflected in the case of People’s Archive of Rural India and some creative apps developed for rural needs such as Follow the Sheep etc. This allows students to understand role of documentation and mediatisation in the research process
Session 5: The rural in Literature: The final module looks as debates in Rural Development through Tagore and Gandhi through collective readings of Red Oleander OR Raktakarabi, engaging with Tagore and Gandhi’s debate on development through The wheel versus red oleander.
Assessment Details with weights:
Reading List:
