Designed around the idea of the “Listening Session Series” begun in O. P. Jindal Global University in the Spring of 2019, this course is meant for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in pursuing artistic research writing on music and sounds. The course is designed as a series of workshops enabling learners to engage with spaces in terms of sounds and to produce sound stories in the form of multisensory pieces combining audio recordings and written words. Questioning the conventional and limited understanding of a text as a purely literary site of research this course uses methods of reading and writing combining more than one medium of expression. The audio recordings and the written word do not exist in separation from each other in the course outputs. On the contrary they complement each other to address two primary concerns – Can writing about the senses alter our ways of envisioning writing? Can the act of reading become an act of listening?

Sound walks in the campus and its vicinities, audio recordings, individual and collaborative writing, and in-depth listening sessions form the core activities of the course. These workshops also introduce learners to the interdisciplinary field of “Sound Studies” familiarizing them with contemporary sound art practices. The workshops culminate in a “Listening Session” where selections from the sound stories are presented/played.

Smell and touch are often regarded as ‘inferior’ senses and too subjective to be considered for artistic production and intellectual critique. So much so, that they even struggle to determine their meaning with evidence in the cultural and legal sphere. Most of the visual -centric cultures think of them as mythical, magical, emotional and sensual and not rational enough to be object or method of the scientific discourse. They are often governed and kept contained with ‘distancing’ becoming the buzzword and deodorization sprit of the time. 

However, the recent scholarship on sensory urbanism has highlighted the significant role that smell and touch play in the organization of the social world. For example, social relations of caste and gender get inscribed in the notions of smell and touch and thus mark the depths of the body. Similarly, in Tunisian revolution the fragrance of jasmine becomes the fragrance of the uprising creating a non-verbal and non-sonic method to build solidarity. This course charts the methods to study and write smell and touch, in their material presence as well as their cultural signification. Building on theoretical literature as well as ethnographic cases, the course aims to familiarize students with historical and contemporary direction in the sensory research.

Course Description: This course is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students from any discipline with an interest in understanding the debates on caste in modern Indian politics and society. The course will introduce core issues in the politics of caste and examine complex debates within these ideas through writings on and about caste. Writing is fundamentally a political act since the process of writing and producing ideas contains within itself deep contestations over self, body, voice, representation, and claims. Writing has thus been central to the politics of caste in India where significant interventions have been made in anti-caste struggles, and in demands for emancipation and justice, through writing and making claims for the self and the community. This course thus examines the politics of caste through some of these texts. The course is organised around four thematic ideas which respectively examine.

1. Writing and Writing Back: Claims and Counterclaims to Caste
2. Colonialism and Caste: Writing Changes
3. Debates on Voice: Writing the Self and Writing Others
4. Writing the Public: Claims of Representation

CWS 002 Introduction to Screenwriting

Credits: 3

Prof. Pankaj Challa

Course Description: In this course, we will explore some basics of the craft of screenwriting. We will define the key elements of a screenplay: Scene, dialog, action, and try to understand their function. We will discuss the industry format, always keeping in mind that format and function are intertwined in screenplays. At the end of the course, you will turn in a fully developed Sequence/Short Act (about 12-15 pages, screenplay format).

CWS 003 Memoir Essay

Credits: 3

Prof. Shubhasree Bhattacharyya

Course Description: Foregrounding the Memoir Essay within the larger matrix of the essay form, this workshop intensive course enables students to bridge the seeming gap prevalent in writing methodologies of the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Departing from the position of the Memoir Essay as being a purely personal narrative, this course situates the genre in its myriad connections with lived experiences as well as formative social factors that contribute to the same. Personal memories as a function of time and the human mind are as important to this course as are the methods required in writing the same. The methodology is process oriented and by the end of the course the students are expected to come up with their individual styles of writing in this genre thereby shaping the field both in terms of content and form.