Elective Courses

Identities in a Plural Society
Nalini Rajan, Dean of Studies, ACJ

The idea of what constitutes an “Indian identity” is of crucial importance to Indian journalists.  In a country of such bewildering diversity and pluralism, it is important to analyse the social construction of identities.  This course comprises discussions around  colonial and postcolonial gender constructions, Dumont’s structuralist architecture of caste, Dirks’s colonial construction, and the Dalit backlash, the story of secularism from the 15th to the 21st century, multicultural theory, and finally, Edward Said’s homage to the intellectual identity.  This course is designed to give the student an understanding of the dynamics of a pluralist society through the study of texts and lively conversation.

Leading Issues in Economics
Venkatesh Athreya, Professor of Economics (Retd.), Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli

Objectives

The major objectives of this course are (a) to familiarise participants with the basic features of India’s economy and its key economic institutions as they have evolved since independence; (b) to introduce the students to contemporary issues in India’s development in an analytical-historical perspective; and (c) to discuss the policies of “economic reform” in India in a critical framework.

 The broad outline of the topics to be covered in the course is given below:

• Impact of colonial rule on Indian Economy and the economy at Independence.
• The first phase of India’s economic development since independence (1951–66)- The strategy of planned capitalist development – Public sector, import substitution and agrarian reforms – The first three 5-year plans – Building key economic institutions; Progress and contradictions; The economic crisis of 1966.
• The Indian Economy from 1966 to 1980 – Policy responses to the 1966 crisis – “Right & Left” critiques of Indian planning and development strategy – Green Revolution – Oil shock 1973 – Emergency 1975-77 – The Janata Interlude – The crisis of 1979-80.
• The Indian Economy in the 1980s – The 1981 IMF loan – Fiscal expansion and economic liberalization – “Expenditure–led” economic growth – The emergence of fiscal and balance of payments crisis – Developments in the international arena – The “watershed” year 1991.
•  Indian Economy under Neoliberal Reforms Phase 1 from 1991 to 2014 – The response to the 1991 crisis – The Diagnosis – IMF & World Bank Loans – Policies of Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG) – Impact of global economic crisis of 2008 – Trends in Economic Growth, Employment, Poverty and Food Security 1991-2014.
• Indian Economy under BJP rule 2014-2021 – Demonetization 2016 – GST 2017 – Sharp decline in Economic Growth 2018 – 2020 – The triple crises of Unemployment, Agrarian Distress and Demand – Covid19 Pandemic and Policy Response.
• Overall Reflections on Indian Economic Development

Sports Writing
K.C. Vijaya Kumar, Sports Editor, The Hindu

There is a great demand for good sports writing in India. In addition to theoretical issues concerning the nature of sport and its function in society, this course leans heavily on practical work. A good sports writer has to be, above all, a good writer.

While knowledge of particular sports and games is essential, it is not sufficient to ensure high quality sports journalism. The exercises teach the

The course also considers the market for sports writing — what story to do, and where to place it. It introduces students to the special requirements of sports reporting for various media. Students read outstanding sports writers, including‘non-specialists’ who have written with passion on the sport they love: C.L.R. James, Mike Marqusee, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others.

Covering Ecology and Environment
Nityanand Jayaraman, independent journalist and social activist

Nityanand Jayaraman

Issues relating to ecology and the environment have received substantial, though not insightful, media coverage in the last decade. The coverage, by and large, has failed to make the linkage between environmental degradation and issues of justice. The effects of environmental degradation are portrayed as affecting all of humanity in a similar manner.

However, an overwhelming body of evidence maintains that the poor, the marginalised and historically oppressed sections of society suffer a disproportionately high share of the ill-effects, while the well-off and politically powerful manage to not just fare better in the face of adverse environmental circumstances, but also benefit from the degradation.

Writing on environment and ecology requires an ability to make sense of social and natural sciences, in addition to the conventional journalistic skills of identifying sources and interviewing. In covering science, the ability to discern fact from conjecture becomes crucial. The role of industry and commerce (corporations), through their control of media and scientific institutions, needs to be understood if one is to tackle the myth that all “science” is science and that “science” is objective. The course will also touch upon some of the critical environmental issues. More importantly, though, it will help students pitch environmental stories and identify environmental angles to mainstream stories. This course will heavily emphasise “environmental justice” (Who gains? Who loses?) as a framework to understand environmental problems, their causes and effects. The course aims to develop research and analytical skills. This elective will be a combination of lecture sessions, field trips, interactive sessions, research projects and role-play exercises.

Music and Freedom 
Gowri Ramnarayan, Musician, Playwright and Journalist

This elective looks at three kinds of music – art music, music as communitarian/cultural expression and bonding, and entertainment music. Distinct as these categories are, the lines have sometimes crossed or got blurred. All three have come under fire at sometime or other in human history.

While music is possibly the first art form practiced by humanity, moralists in many cultures have damned music as pandering to the senses and therefore debilitating or downright dangerous. Starting with Plato who excluded music and all other arts in his republic, totalitarian regimes past and present have banned certain kinds of music, fined, jailed and killed songsters and music makers.

This elective will look at the reasons for this antagonism and also devote some classes to understanding art music – specifically Carnatic and Hindustani genres, its role in society, particularly some gender issues about the confinement of women artistes to a certain social class, limited by convention to making only certain kinds of “feminine music”.

Talking Cinema
Baradwaj Rangan, Editor, Film Companion (South)

Baradwaj Rangan

This is a class that aims to encourage students to bring to bear on their cinema viewing a unique perspective. Therefore, this will necessarily be a class about watching cinema, which is not the same as leaning back in your chair and stuffing your mouth with popcorn. We will watch a film or two over the semester, analysing it to shreds, with students saying what they “saw” (i.e. how they interpreted this segment with respect to staging, acting, or any other aspect which catches their unique eye). For the midterm assignment, students will present and discuss a film clip of their choice. The finals will involve a written essay

Covering Gender
S. Anandhi, Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies

Students studying to work in the media are engaged in the business of looking and reporting, seeing and understanding. But one rarely looks and sees innocently. There are ways of seeing which we have inherited from the past and which define vision itself. The gender lens is primary in this context — it frames and naturalises inequality, deprivation, violence, and injustice.

The course argues therefore that gender — as a way of seeing, living and understanding — has to be both unlearnt and re-Iearned, in the interests of equality and justice. To do this, the learner has to implicate herself in what she wishes to analyse, put herself in the middle of her subject of study. This does not mean that the classroom turns into a confessional, but it does mean that the everyday we take for granted be stood on its head and examined critically.

The course demonstrates how we may do this, both conceptually and practically. It begins with an examination of the circumstances in which gender emerged as a category of analysis. It suggests that gender relationships are historically contingent and goes on to demonstrate why and how we might want to deploy gender as a critical category.

The units that follow examine critically those personal, social and public sites where gender routinely ‘happens’: family, kinship, community, work, sexuality, art, and culture. The last set of units is titled ‘Issues in Focus’. This section looks at contemporary concerns using the gender lens: caste and community, political power, poverty, and survival.

Documentary Film and the Investigation of Reality
Nilita Vachani, a documentary filmmaker, writer and educator who divides her time between India and New York

With the enhancement of digital technologies, visual documentation is an indispensable part of journalistic practice. The power of the documentary comes from its engagement with the world around us, its social, political and ethical concerns, its exploration of urgent and compelling stories, and the many ways of telling them. Since the birth of cinema, non-fiction film has evolved a diverse range of forms and styles, resisting any simple genre classification.

Through a series of lectures and screenings drawn from world cinema, this course will provide students with a firm understanding and appreciation of the genre’s wide-ranging possibilities, whether realist, political, poetic, ethnographic, cinema verité, observational, essayist, personal, reflexiveor archival. Any documentation is equally about the form as it is about the content. This course will teach students how to look anew and inspire them to think deeply about every representation of ‘Reality’. The aim is to make responsible, reflective, and creative practitioners.

Each student will have the opportunity to research an original story/subject and make a short 1-2 minute single shot film. It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that the student have a DSLR or Video camera with a shotgun microphone. REQUISITE: High Speed Broadband if the course is being taken online.

Photojournalism
Desikan Krishnan, former photo editor, The Hindu

The course has been redesigned for online learning.

In this course, the controls of the digital camera, and the terms used to describe them, are explained with visuals.

Besides teaching students how to shoot for news reports, the course will have sessions on picture selection, cropping, and caption writing.

News room discussions on selection and publishing of sensitive photographs form an important part of the course.

Identifying themes and subjects for photo features , standalone photographs, sports, macros, portraits, documentation photography, the development and history of photojournalism — all form part of the lectures.

Photojournalists, expert wildlife, nature, and environmental photographers share their experiences in guest lectures.

The elective emphasises the role of visuals as a powerful communication tool in journalism and its effective display and use.

Science Reporting
Shubashree Desikan, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu Editorial
R. Ramanujam, Visiting Professor at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru

When you start thinking about writing ‘something’ on science, you are usually stumped for an idea. It is when you get into the practice of writing that you realize that ideas abound – and what you experienced earlier was merely a bottleneck of sorts. There is no dearth of demand on your part! On the other hand, science itself offers a close-to-infinite supply of material. A science journalist sits in a finite space, resulting from the intersection of several such infinities. In this elective, we will define and tap this finite space, bearing in mind that there is lot to build on, over and above this. We will also attempt to provide students with a flavour of what it means to be a science journalist in the present time.

The topics we will touch upon in the course will include:
Practice: relevance of science journalism (SJ); figuring out the simple and the complex in SJ; Finding “your” stories; How to talk to experts; handling uncertainty in the topic you are writing about (covering your back); The role of expertise; towards critical SJ; what is “balance” in SJ?

Philosophy: Aspects of 21 century science and the journalist’s opportunities and predicaments; Where do we come from – a bit of history of science; Indian science – does science have borders? Society and science

All topics will have suggested reading material.

Investigative Journalism Techniques
Nikhil Kanekal, Journalist and Lawyer

This course is intended to teach students how to report and present investigative news stories and features. Student journalists will be taught how to dig for information, analyze data, and flesh out the investigative edge in stories.The class will also learn about and discuss topics such as corruption, public accountability, terrorism, unethical business practices, environmental hazards, public health and conflicts of interest that key people face in their private or public lives.

The course will include hard interviewing techniques, learning to piece together documentary and digital evidence, and explanatory ways of writing or producing a complicated story – since most investigative stories are intricate webs of information. By examining a few investigative stories as case studies, the class shall attempt to take students through the process of forming a hypothesis, collecting evidence and then presenting it in a cogent, lucid narrative.

The course will be kept platform-neutral as best as possible – students from print, broadcast or digital media can take it – and teaching material will range from book readings, films, seminars on investigative journalism and guest lectures from investigative journalists in the field.

Defence & Strategic Affairs
Manoj Joshi, Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

The course will look at the issue of defence and strategic affairs from the point of view of a journalist. The emphasis will be on practical, rather than theoretical issues and the focus will be on India, even though we will discuss issues relating to regional and extra-regional countries. The perspective of the course will be that, for India, the primary goal is that of national construction, or to put it another way, the economic transformation of the country. To achieve this end, it is mandatory for the country to have a peaceful internal and external environment. Defence and strategic policy must follow this imperative. The goal of the country’s military and security services is to provide that peaceful space by their ability to deter those that seek to disrupt it. Government policy must be aimed at resolving contentious issues, if not, effectively managing them at the lowest level of violence and disruption.

The course will broadly look at

1. India’s Grand Strategy, its successes and failures,
2. Combining hard and soft power to attain the goals set by the grand strategy. This involves a study of military capacity, deterrence capability, space policy, oceans, internet, diplomacy, diaspora and democracy promotion.
3. Economic growth looking at harnessing investment, strategic resources, shaping a global economic order that enhances India’s goals
4. Shaping internal institutions and processes in government towards the national goal
5. multilateral challenges such as climate change, securing water resources, pandemics,
6. the issue of internal security, the task of maintaining political unity, combating terrorism, organised crime, cyber challenges.
7. Obtaining a benign periphery SAARC and the Indian Ocean

Covering minorities in the South Asian context
Seema Chishti, Journalist & Writer

Seema Chishti

This should be a no-brainer and not a course at all. The business of reporting a country or the world must naturally be about reporting on that which is under a rock.

But India’s mainstream newsoutlets in recent years seem to just want to respond to what the largest numbers want. Hence, a lot of the reporting ends up focusing on ‘user-friendly’ matters, or what people imagine their readers/viewers want to read and can ‘use’. This could be about traffic, parking woes, tips on how to behave in a party etc. This becomes almost the journalistic equivalent of self-help books – rather than providing a meaningful and robust account of what is unfolding around us and how India’s reality is shaping up and changing.

There is a need for a short but sharp course which drives home the need for reporting on the innumerable social groups in India, who make up its vast diversity. So even if they are not numerous, taken by themselves, India would not be India if all its minorities were to be airbrushed. This course would also aim to provide perspective on how reporting could be done fairly, sensitively and in a way that informs those entirely unfamiliar with them.

These aspects can be discussed across as many sessions normally set aside for elective courses –

1. The first session could be one where we drive home what we mean by minorities and why minorities matter to society – framing the issue – in a context beyond India’s.
2. How to be mindful of reporting on minorities, the global debates on this, the sensitivity of reporting on a George Floyd, a demand to de-fund the police, or an LGBT protest in Hungary, a pro-abortion rally in Poland, etc
3. The nuts and bolts – data and facts in India – how minorities have been defined, who they are, and what their social, economic and educational status is, and why it matters.
4. The relationship of ‘minorities’ with the particular politics that dominates India today, how it became controversial. More history and perspective, a down-the-ages account.
5. In 2021, what does it look like to be a minority in India?
6. How to go out and report on minorities in India, cultivate sources, smell out stories, and tell them to a larger audience, make it relevant to their lives?

Hindu Nationalism and Politics
Vikas Pathak , Faculty, ACJ

The last few years have seen Hindu Nationalism lay claim to being the hegemonic vision of Indian nationalism. Consecutive victories of the BJP in 2014 and 2019 — alongside its increasing geographical spread — have made Hindu Nationalism, once a marginal vision, almost the synonym of Indian nationalism in the minds of many.

A keener understanding of the phenomenon — as also the larger battle for hegemony it has waged over a century with secular visions of Indian nationalism — requires an exploration of Hindu Nationalism as an attempt at imagining the Indian nation through the prism of majoritarian religio-cultural categories.

The elective aims at doing precisely this.

It seeks to offer an overview of the rise of Hindu nationalism from the late 19th century and early 20th centuries — the Arya Samaj, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the RSS were its key vehicles — to its post-independence phases, leading up to the present times. The formation of the Jana Sangh and its successor, the BJP, will be part of this exploration. The journey of these political parties has seen phases of adjustment with “secular” parties under the rubric of anti-Congressism and phases of a surge around core Hindutva themes that often run counter to the project of secularism in India.

The enquiry would also entail a deep study of the BJP’s caste constituencies and the recent deepening of its social base, with the party shedding its “Brahmanical” tag and tactically reaching out to sections among OBCs and Dalits that were gradually feeling that parties championing social justice hadn’t been able to provide them adequate representation.

How did the BJP emerge as India’s main political party under NarendraModi? How did it seek to claim a monopoly over nationalism in India?

The elective will intend to provide a multi-dimensional view — with discussions on the theoretical work around Hindutva, the organisational structures of the RSS and its affiliates, and the trajectory of the BJP over the decades culminating in the rise of Modi — of Hindu Nationalism in order to facilitate deeper insights into it.

Culture, Consumption and Communication
Uma Vangal Shivakumar, Filmmaker & Fulbright Research Scholar, Kenyon College, Ohio

ET Hall says : Culture is communication; communication culture. This is exemplified as we study the media ‘s role in creating mass cultures and niche sub-cultures in audiences as they target them for commercial and entertainment purposes. Increased negotiations with Co-cultures and Intercultural travel, relationships that are Cross-cultural, the media plays a crucial role in creating assumptions and breaking stereotypes. While exploring the ways in which media works in the Transnational, the global and the local media markets, audiences become intertwined today with the strands of media and news cultures. As audiences are increasingly drawn into the mediated worldview, shared symbols and socialisation permeates every aspect of their lives.

Culture dictates media and in turn the media encapsulates culture. Audiences across the globe are linked today by all forms of media in an increasingly connected world. Media makers and practitioners are no longer looking at specific audiences within borders. Every mode of communication is now mediated through various cultural prisms. Mediated cultures in transnational communication being consumed by a by glocalised audiences and a study of media formats fed by cultural notions will be the focus of this course and students will attempt to find ways to create meaning, make meaning and find new ways to navigate news and cultural scapes.

The World of Cinema
Hariharan Krishnan, Film maker and Academician

Over the semester we shall investigate how Cinema, this late 19th century Franco-American industrial product, managed to capture the imagination of billions of people across the globe at such a rapid pace.Considering the high levels of scholarship in the 20th century along with the sophisticated thought streams in the field of arts and philosophy, we will study howcinema exploded on thousands of silver screens, produced mostly by self-taught technicians, and poorly-paid ‘circus’ style impresarios. For a medium which was written off as low-brow by the elite & educated, how did the power of democratic struggles waged by common citizens validate itself through cinema as the most powerful expression of popular culture? We will see the conflict between art and commerce, international and regional playing out a kind of ‘Ras-Leela’ caught in the triangle of Technology, Audio-Visual grammar and spectatorship. All sessions will be accompanied by screenings of short films, documentaries, and feature-length films.