Department of Sociology, University of Kerala

The Department of Sociology, established in 1969 is one of the major teaching and research departments of the University of Kerala. The unique feature of the Department is that among all the five universities in the state; only the University of Kera ersities in the state; only the University of Kerala has a university teaching and research Department in Sociology. In all other Universities, Sociology is offered only in the affiliated colleges. Therefore the Department has a prominent role to play in designing the courses of various programmes in teaching and research in Sociology at different levels of study. Since the last 40 years the Department has taken up the challenges and remained as a guiding force for the Undergraduate, Post-graduate, M.Phil, Doctoral research in Sociology and Social Work, and Women's Studies. The Department has taken the lead in the curriculum modification to incorporate Women's studies and modules on HIV and Trafficking in the post-graduate courses in Social Sciences of the University of Kerala. The Department which started in 1969 with only a post-graduate course in the annual scheme and a PhD program could introduce the M.Phil program by 1995 and also introduce the Credit and Semester System for the M.A course in the same year. It has now also started two postgraduate certificate courses in the course program, which will be expanded in the future. Under the Sociology department a new MSW program has also been started in 2009. The department has been also encouraging independent research and also focusing on extension/outreach programs so as to enable the students to have a live experience of the classroom teaching. The Department further envisages to teaching and research by developing a Centre for Qualitative and Quantitative methods, Counseling Centre and a Documentation centre in HIV and Geriatric Care. As a prestigious discipline in the social sciences, the Department fosters a department library that nourish not only the student clientele of the concerned department but also other departments of University of Kerala and other universities in the state besides national and international scholars. The department library has a good treasure of reading materials accounting to 7304 books. Besides a large number of current and back volumes of periodicals, PhD, M.Phil and MA dissertations/thesis. The library is also equipped with an Internet facility. The total number of books added to the library in the past five years shows that the highest number was in the year 2008-09, an addition of 204 books. It may be pointed out that two newly subscribed journals and one foreign journal has been added to the library collection.