The transition from being a Sociologist based in the United States to being a Sociologist in India has been an interesting one to say the very least. In my first term here, I was asked to teach a required course that had been titled “Introduction to Sociological and Anthropological Thought”, which has been a vastly different experience from how I’ve been teaching introductory courses on Sociology in the past. It’s somewhat daunting to blend the histories and particularities of (what have now become) two very distinct disciplines. At the same time, it has been incredibly refreshing to work with literature from Indian scholars that I haven’t read in a long time, or at all for that matter.

Krea University (where I currently work) follows a trimester system. In T3 (Trimester/Term 3) of the current academic year, I will be teaching two elective courses on “Social Media and Society” and “Sociology and STS through Science Fiction” respectively. I figured I’d share truncated versions of their syllabi out here in case anyone had something (constructive) to say about it. Though intended to be used at a university that uses the 11-week trimester system, these could be easily repurposed for one that follows the 10-week quarter system, or even the 16-week semester system for that matter.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like access to all the readings for these two courses, or more information on how I’d be assessing the students in these classes.

Social Media and Society: “Social Media and Society” examines digital platforms as central institutions of contemporary social life. Rather than treating social media as a discrete technological domain, the course conceptualizes platforms as socio-technical infrastructures that mediate visibility, labor, identity, governance, and inequality at scale. The course begins by analyzing the infrastructural and classificatory foundations of social networking systems before progressing to the forms of work, algorithmic reasoning, and public-making that they enable. Subsequent modules address the intensification of harm—misogyny, racism, casteism, extremism—as well as the emergence of illicit economies, trauma narratives, and new forms of digital care. The syllabus combines foundational scholarship in Sociology, STS, and Media Studies with recent qualitative and theoretical studies from diverse global contexts.

Sociology and STS through Science Fiction: “Sociology and STS Through Science Fiction” treats speculative cinema and short fiction as the basis for a comparative ethnography of power. Across eleven weeks, the course follows a curated sequence of science fiction films (Gattaca, Arrival, Akira, Blade Runner, Snowpiercer, Equilibrium, The Matrix, District 9, Sorry to Bother You, Brazil) alongside anti-caste and South Asian speculative writing drawn primarily from The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF and The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Volume 2. These materials provide grounded, situated imaginaries of genetic citizenship, infrastructural domination, border regimes, racial capitalism, bureaucratic violence, and abolitionist horizons that are often only abstractly theorized in canonical social theory. The course is explicitly comparative and decolonial in orientation. It centers anti-caste, Dalit-Bahujan, and Global South perspectives to interrogate who is rendered human, governable, expendable, or impossible in dominant techno-political imaginaries, and invites students to experiment with their own public-facing critical work (video essays, zines, policy briefs, speculative manifestos) as a mode of sociological practice.