faculty led programs

Faculty Led Programs

STEM, Innovation & Future Technologies

AI, Space Technology & Digital Innovation

India is emerging as a laboratory for mission-driven technology development — combining artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, semiconductor ambitions, and space innovation into a coordinated national strategy. This theme explores how technological capacity is built at scale: how compute infrastructure is financed, how talent pipelines are cultivated, how regulatory frameworks are designed, and how research translates into startup ecosystems and public systems.

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Engineering & Manufacturing

Manufacturing is not merely production — it is coordination. It is the choreography of materials, machines, labor, logistics, capital, standards, policy incentives, and global trade positioning.

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Food Studies

Food is one of the most powerful analytical lenses available to students of society. It links soil to city, climate to culture, labor to logistics, ritual to regulation. Through food, we can trace migration patterns, ecological constraints, gendered labor, global trade routes, public health systems, and climate vulnerability.

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Architecture

Architecture in the Indian subcontinent has historically mediated between cosmology and climate, sovereignty and settlement, ritual and regulation. From Vāstu Śāstra–guided temple complexes to colonial port infrastructures, from Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh to B.V. Doshi’s climate-sensitive modernism, the built environment becomes a record of belief systems, political authority, ecological intelligence, and economic exchange.

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Climate Change & Environmental Justice

Climate change is not experienced uniformly. Rising seas, glacial retreat, biodiversity collapse, extreme heat, and water scarcity disproportionately affect communities already structured by inequality. Exposure and vulnerability are shaped by land tenure, gender, caste, class, migration status, and institutional capacity.

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Digital Public Infrastructure & GovTech

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is transforming how states structure identity, deliver services, move money, and govern at scale. Unlike abstract models of e-governance, India offers a visible and interoperable public digital “stack” — identity (Aadhaar), payments (UPI), registries, DigiLocker, DIKSHA, eSanjeevani, POSHAN Tracker — that can be studied as functioning institutional architecture.

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Smart Cities, Urbanization & Infrastructure Justice

Cities are not neutral spaces — they are systems that distribute access, opportunity, and risk. Infrastructure determines who receives reliable water, safe mobility, digital connectivity, cooling, sanitation, and public space — and who does not. This theme examines urbanization through the lens of infrastructure justice. India offers a uniquely instructive case: the Smart Cities Mission produced a large portfolio of digital command-and-control centers, urban dashboards, mobility projects, public space redesigns, and governance reforms.

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Community, Equity & Global Systems

Community Engagement & Community-Based Learning

Community engagement, when academically grounded, becomes Community-Based Learning (CBL): a reciprocal, ethically structured partnership between students, faculty, and host communities. This theme moves beyond charity models toward co-production of knowledge, shared problem-solving, and faculty-aligned research engagement.

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Gender Studies & Women's Empowerment

Gender operates through institutions — markets, cooperatives, safety systems, public health networks, governance structures, and community norms. This program examines empowerment not as a slogan, but as a structured interaction between agency and constraint.

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Healthcare Systems

Healthcare systems are complex socio-technical ecosystems shaped by governance structures, financing mechanisms, workforce distribution, infrastructure, digital innovation, and culturally embedded healing traditions. Understanding how care is delivered requires moving beyond clinical settings to examine institutions, referral hierarchies, data systems, policy incentives, and the social determinants that influence access and outcomes.

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Rural Development & Sustainable Livelihoods

Rural economies are complex systems shaped by ecology, institutions, migration, markets, and governance. Far from static or peripheral, rural regions are sites of adaptation, innovation, and institutional experimentation. Households combine assets—land, labor, skills, social capital, ecological resources—within evolving policy and market contexts.

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Security, Geopolitics & Maritime Order

This program is designed as an academic security studies immersion, not tactical or operational training. It examines how states interpret threats, construct strategy, manage crises, and navigate complex regional environments.

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Security, South Asia Geopolitics & Maritime Strategy

This theme is designed as an academic security studies program — not tactical training — focused on geopolitics, regional security dilemmas, and maritime strategy in the Indo-Pacific. It situates India within overlapping strategic theatres: continental border tensions, Indian Ocean maritime competition, neighborhood complexities, and evolving global partnerships.

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Security, Geopolitics & Maritime Strategy

This 13-day program begins with foundational frameworks in security studies, levels of analysis (individual, state, system), and ethics of policy reasoning. The Delhi phase focuses on continental geopolitics and alliance structures. Students analyze Indo-Pacific strategy narratives, India–China border stabilization case studies, India–Pakistan deterrence dynamics, and the strategic logic of partnerships

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Criminal Justice Systems, Human Rights & International Law

Criminal justice systems are institutional expressions of social order, state authority, and normative visions of justice. They shape who is protected, who is punished, and how legitimacy is constructed.

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Global Health and One Health Systems

Global health is increasingly defined by cross-sector risk at the human–animal–environment interface. Outbreak preparedness, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), food safety, zoonotic spillover, climate-driven mobility, and watershed degradation require coordinated governance beyond traditional public health silos.

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Comparative Education & Youth Development

Education systems are among the most powerful institutional engines shaping social mobility, identity formation, economic opportunity, and democratic participation. Yet policy aspiration, classroom practice, youth experience, and long-term outcomes often diverge in complex ways.

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Supply Chains, Ports & Indo-Pacific Trade Corridors

Trade corridors are not simply economic pathways; they are instruments of strategy, diplomacy, industrial policy, and regional stability. Ports, multimodal logistics systems, industrial clusters, and digital trade platforms are increasingly shaped by geopolitical competition, chokepoint vulnerabilities, climate risk, and infrastructure diplomacy.

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Arts, Culture & Movement

Sustainable Fashion, Textiles and Craft Economies

This theme treats fashion and textiles as interconnected economic, ecological, cultural, and political systems. Moving from fiber cultivation and industrial production to artisan craft economies and global trade, participants examine how sustainability, labor dignity, infrastructure, policy, and market access shape the life cycle of a product.

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Media, Documentary Storytelling and Ethics

This theme treats documentary storytelling as a disciplined research practice rather than mere media production. Participants examine narrative inquiry, consent-based interviewing, evidence logging, power dynamics, and conflict-sensitive framing as core components of ethical field research. Documentary becomes a method of public scholarship—requiring structured protocols, reflexivity, and defensible ethical files.

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Food Systems, Nutrition and Culinary Anthropology

This theme treats food as a deeply interconnected system that links biology, governance, markets, ecology, labor, identity, and culture. Participants examine how nutrition policy, public institutions, supply chains, gender roles, migration, and culinary traditions shape what people eat—and who has access to safe, affordable, and culturally meaningful food.

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Yoga, Contemplative Pedagogy and Embodied Knowledge Systems

This theme approaches yoga and contemplative practice as rigorous knowledge systems rather than lifestyle trends. Rooted in the philosophical architecture of the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, yoga is examined as a theory of mind, perception, and disciplined transformation — centered on the regulation of attention (citta-vṛtti-nirodha), ethical formation, and embodied inquiry.

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Environment, Conservation & Outdoor Learning

Wildlife Conservation & Biodiversity

Wildlife conservation is not simply a matter of species protection — it is a question of governance, institutional design, justice, and resilience under ecological stress. This theme treats biodiversity landscapes as socio-ecological systems shaped by power, law, livelihoods, climate risk, and competing development priorities.

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Himalayan Studies & Outdoor Leadership

The Himalaya is not merely a landscape — it is a living system of water, migration, pilgrimage, subsistence agriculture, tourism economies, and climate volatility. This theme integrates outdoor leadership progression with mountain socio-ecological systems inquiry, positioning the Himalayan corridor as both expedition environment and governance classroom.

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Tibetan Trail of Tears

This theme examines modern Tibetan exile as a case study in stateless governance, cultural preservation, and non-violent political strategy. Through the lived landscape of the Tibetan community in India, participants explore how displacement transforms institutions, identity, and international advocacy.

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