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Ashoka University’s undergraduate course curriculum is taught across three semesters: Spring, Summer and Monsoon (Fall). Courses are broadly divided into three categories – Foundation Courses (core curriculum), Major & Minor Courses and Co-Curricular Courses.
You may search courses offered at Ashoka here. Please use the drop down menu to choose the specific semester and subject to see the full list of courses under each department. Foundation courses are offered in all semesters and do not have prerequisites. Offerings in other categories differ in each semester. Some higher level major/minor courses may have prerequisites.
To view Summer Semester Courses-2024: Click here
Media and Democracy
Is there a straightforward relationship between proliferation of media and democracy? Does freedom for media necessarily mean democratic freedom? What if free media translates into corporatized control over media platforms, algorithms, content, eventually publics themselves? How do we reconcile the rise of digital technologies that evoke narratives of emancipation, autonomy, and freedom- with the simultaneous rise of online troll cultures, virulent racism, sexism, xenophobia, and exclusionary political ideologies around the globe? Answers to questions such as these depend, to begin with, on how we approach understandings of media, democracy, or freedom.
We will think about mediation as social process that extends beyond ‘the media’- not as power emanating from specific objects, technologies, or institutional practices, but as the ideological foundation of social life. We explore the relationships of media with electoral democracy and its political institutions, but also what they mean for ordinary people outside of its formal and elite institutions: their local meanings and practices, contestations and shifting forms of power, and the multiplicity of desires they both produce and represent. Towards these objectives, we examine actions of governments that relate to repression of media and democratic freedoms- and the struggles to liberate them; but also, how morally loaded concepts such as `freedom’ are given particular meanings in their discourses and social practices.
The challenge in this course will be to both apprehend the dominant configurations of `media’ and `democracy’ in present times, as well as anticipate imaginations of their possible forms and praxis that might provide for a more diverse and equal world.
