Kartik Anilkumar

Kartik (she/they) studies Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts. She is also the cead of the Queer Collective at her college and has previously headed the poetry club. She is deeply interested in historical and contemporary politics surrounding gender and sexuality, particularly in post-colonial nation-states that are still experiencing modernity while being privy to the disjunctures created by globalization and neo-liberal capitalism. They really enjoy poetry and theatre and exploring urban queer subcultures in the cities that they frequent in. They also thoroughly enjoy watching films that are particularly either arthouse/parallel productions or occupy progressive subject positions within the culture industry.

Gail Omvedt: Biography, Works, Contributions

Gail Omvedt as she would describe herself in three simple English terms was a writer, researcher and activist to put it simply. However, the body politic of the numerous grassroots movements that she has contributed to in various capacities as well as several social scientists and students who have been inspired by her life and … Read more

W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk – Veil and Doule Consciousness

In W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, explain how his use of the concepts of ‘veil’ and ‘double consciousness’ help to explain that race and the marginalization of African Americans is a socially constructed narrative? (7.5 marks, 800-900 words) The Souls of Black Folk, is a seminal work by African-American Sociologist … Read more

Annihilation of Caste, how does he address the idea of radical societal overhaul from a caste perspective?

Looking at B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, how does he address the idea of radical societal overhaul from a caste perspective? Explain this in terms of his countering of the predominant political and economic reform narrative of his time. (7.5 marks, 800-900 words) Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, in his most popular writing entitled “The Annihilation … Read more

RESPONSE TO BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott, is a science fiction film that is set in a dystopian future world (Los Angeles) that is overridden with Urban Density artificiality and has seen human colonisation beyond the planet Earth. It’s loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. Genetic and Bioengineering is … Read more

Jeffrey Alexander and Cultural Sociology

Imagining and Re-imagining the Social: A response to the Cultural Sociology of Jeffrey Alexander Jeffrey Alexander is an American sociologist who is perhaps most widely acknowledged in his response to Parsonian Structural-Functionalism and pioneering the sub-discipline of Cultural Sociology. Alexander’s theorizing was crucial to the reshaping of American Sociological Thought which was dominated by Parsonian … Read more

David Harvey’s “The Condition of Postmodernity” (1989)

Modernity and Modernism, from David Harvey’s “ The Condition of Postmodernity ” (1989) Marxist geographer David Harvey can be regarded as one of the earliest theorists of the postmodern condition. Harvey, in his book mentioned above, discusses the postmodern condition with respect to various critical ideas that contributed to the epistemology of the postmodern condition. … Read more