डॉ. बी. आर. अम्बेडकर विश्वविद्यालय दिल्ली 
| Course Type | Course Code | No. Of Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation Core | SCC2FS400 | 4 |
Semester and Year Offered: Winter
Course Coordinator and Team: Dr. Vebhuti Duggal, Dr. Rajan Krishnan
Email of course coordinator: vebhuti[at]aud[dot]ac[dot]in
Pre-requisites: None
Course Objectives/Description:
The dissertation course is an intellectual exercise that encourages creative inquiries into the broad field of film and media studies. One of the core objectives of this course is to be able to gather the disciplinary knowledge gathered over the previous semesters’ and thereby produce broader areas and specific questions of research. The course allows for explorations of gaps in disciplinary literature, urges students to follow their research interests, and allows writing abilities to flourish. Dissertations of upto 20,000 words are produced, often following original analyses and breaking new ground in film and media studies. The dissertation course urges students to locate their research questions in socio-historical and political milieus. The course also prompts a deep engagement with questions of cinematic and medial form, cinema-media-culture connections in the process of articulating research questions.
Course outcomes:
On successful completion of this course, the student should demonstrate following abilities:
Critical Thinking and Analytic Reasoning: The student should be able to think critically through their chosen dissertation material/archive/subject and elaborate an argument through analysing evidence.
Communication skills: Students should become adept at long-form academic writing, which involves being able to demonstrate the ability to read and rehearse arguments from literature in the field, evaluate and deploy primary evidence of several different materials and put together an argument, cogently, in formal academic language.
Self-learning: This is a course which is driven by the student and their research interests. Thus, the topics, the problematics and the methods to engage with them are foregrounded through the students’ pursuit of a single research question or set of questions.
Research-related skills: The course is specifically aimed at imparting skills in research. That is, students must be able to identify a research question/s, expand upon the research problem, and identify relationships between their work and the field of study.
Disciplinary knowledge: The dissertation produces a deep disciplinary engagement by virtue of (a) an attempt to ask questions within the broader field of film studies focusing upon specific strands/ thematics as well as (b) interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary questions being engaged with from the perspective of film and media studies.
Module based descriptions and readings:
These are individually designed and therefore, do not have a specific set of modules. Rather, individual reading, viewing lists are designed in consultation with the supervisor, depending upon the research problematic and methods adopted for the students’ dissertation. Further, the nature of the research question might necessitate the adoption of archival or ethnographic or textual or other methods of analysis prompting both theoretically charged readings as well as an engagement with a multiplicity of materials.
Assessment with weights:
The dissertation has two components of evaluation: (a) the written dissertation (b) a viva-voce after the dissertation. The two constitute 100 percent of the dissertation grade.
Readings: See module description above.