MA P&HR

Programme [POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS]

(2021-2023 Batch onwards)

PROGRAMME SPECIFIC OUTCOMES: MA PROGRAMME (POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS)

The Programme Specific Outcomes (PSOs), through courses, in the Politics and Human Rights (HR) stream has become a critical domain of politics and international relations (IR) for more than half a century. The concept and concerns of HR have, however, been expanding during the last three hundred years incorporating a wide range of subjects and rights, which transcend political, ideological and cultural differences/peculiarities of the countries as well as the peoples across the world. The postwar international system has further witnessed the emergence of a world HR culture with liberty, emancipation, education and universalism as integral components of that culture.

The field of HR studies with its characteristic inter-related disciplinary concerns of politics, development, civil society, gender, environment, law, justice etc., and encompassing a wide spectrum of national, international and non-governmental/non-state actors, has brought forth a world wide web of disciplinary concerns such as Political Science, Development studies, Gender studies, Environmental studies, Ethnic studies, Subaltern studies, Conflict Resolution and Peace studies, Disarmament studies etc. This is certainly a vast and expanding domain of social and political research particularly in the context of the changes currently underway in the global matrix of trade and political economy. The academic programme attempts to grapple with this vast corpus of knowledge and ground level realities of HR, through the specific courses and their objectives, while focusing on the global and national concerns of HR, peace, order, equality, justice, etc.

The programme of MA (Politics and Human Rights) is so designed as to facilitate and encourage both theoretical and empirical studies, thereby setting a background for students to have greater interest in HR. The objective here is to generate a deep and critical awareness among the students about the HR question in its national and international dimensions.

The rationale behind the programme is to enable the students (1) to appreciate the growing importance of HR both as an academic enterprise as well as a concern of the contemporary era in all its aspects;(2) to critically evaluate the contending theories of HR;(3) to analyze the social concerns such as development, gender, ecology, and civil society within a HR perspective; and (4) to choose and construct an appropriate design for an empirical investigation of a HR case from a local level experience.

THE COURSE OBJECTIVES- LEARNING OUTCOMES AND EVALUATIONS:

The courses that comprise the specific Masters level programmes offered at the school are attuned in their course objectives towards envisaged towards outcomes that can be contextually evaluated. Though these start from acquisitions of basic knowledge of the components in each stream, viz. International Relations and Politics, Public Policy and Governance as well as Human Rights, they make sense of the specific matters therein and apply such knowledge to address themes delineated in course modules.

The specific course objectives in each specific programme feed into the larger programme outcomes. This is done also by the interdisciplinary engagements as well as bringing in emergent fields of study as mentioned in the over-arching programme structure. In going beyond paradigms of national international into global, critiquing development, understanding regionalities, bringing in newer domains like ecologies, gender, migrations or urbanisation, the course objectives entail higher learning outcomes that evaluate existing frames in each domain and come out with reevaluations and constructive suggestions in seminars, working papers, and workshops.

The Evaluations:

Following the outcome based educational methods, evaluations can no more be singular in frame and unreflective in form. So, a course on West Asian regional context, will be evaluated on terms and technique different from another one on ethnography and yet another one on international theory. These evaluations, though start from basic learning objectives, goes into critical analysis and evaluations that gets stressed in exam. The school feels a need to engage creatively with the scenarios that come under each of its specific programmes, and so the workshops, and seminar as well as occasional student papers focus on the evaluative and constructive outcomes and will be course dependent. This is indicated along with the respective course syllabus.

SYLLABUS

OBE MA HR 2022