Charting Contemporary Sociology

Mahuya Bandyopadhyay and Rit ambhara Hebbar have taken on the exciting and ambitious joint venture of attempting to map out the “new” terrain of of Indian sociology. Their enterprise was motivated in part by the fellow doctoral researchers of their batch, especially as they had found interesting avenues of fi eld rese arch in courts, prisons and even in reconstruction projects in Beirut. However, as the editors suggest in the introduction, the central premise of the volume is that the “newness” of Indian sociology is not limited to novel fi eld sites, but that these new sites in turn demand new methodo logies, sharpen conceptual engagements and are in a very real way “contemporary.” 

The problems taken up, demand the reworking and shifting of old categories, to adequately address emergent socialities and societal configurations. The new sociology is inherently political in the way that it confounds the established logic of separation between the researcher and the researched, questions past knowledge, and renegotiates the connections between human actors, technologies and materiality.