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Political Theory
The normative vocabulary of political life—liberty, equality, justice and rights—and the debates through which these concepts are contested and renewed.
Assistant Professor · Political Science
Teaching and writing on political theory, political philosophy, and the politics of science, technology and gender at Ramanujan College, University of Delhi.
About
Shipra Yadav is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ramanujan College, University of Delhi. Her teaching and research move across political theory and political philosophy, asking how foundational ideas—freedom, equality, justice, rights—take shape in the everyday life of a political community.
A consistent thread in her work is the relationship between politics and the conditions that surround it: the social arrangements of gender, and the increasingly decisive role of science and technology in shaping public life. She is drawn to questions of how societies argue, deliberate and accommodate difference, and how normative concepts can be put to work in reading contemporary debates.
In the classroom she emphasises close reading, conceptual clarity and the patient analysis of arguments—encouraging students to think beyond the given and to approach political life with both rigour and imagination. The Department of Political Science, one of the college's oldest, describes its purpose as the making of conscientious citizens; that ambition runs through her teaching.
Research Interests
Four overlapping fields shape the questions her work returns to.
The normative vocabulary of political life—liberty, equality, justice and rights—and the debates through which these concepts are contested and renewed.
Traditions of thinking about the state, obligation and the good society, read closely from classical sources to contemporary critique.
How scientific knowledge and technological change reorganise power, expertise and public life—and what that asks of democratic politics.
Gender as a category of political analysis: the way it structures rights, representation and the boundary between the private and the public.
Teaching
Courses offered under the B.A. (Hons.) Political Science programme, University of Delhi (UGCF). Open a course for its full syllabus, readings, examination scheme and guidelines.
Freedom, equality, justice, rights and democracy—introduced as living values and traced through the debates that keep them contested.
The linkages between politics and economics in world affairs—theoretical traditions, trade, finance, and the political economy of a connected world.
Profile
Yadav's pedagogy is built on the conviction that political concepts are not abstractions to be memorised but tools for understanding the shared conditions of living together. Her courses begin with careful definition and move toward argument: students learn to take a concept apart, to weigh competing positions, and to reconstruct a defensible view of their own.
She structures her teaching around primary and secondary readings drawn from the University of Delhi's prescribed curriculum, supplemented by contemporary debates that connect theory to the present. Tutorials are used for close discussion and writing, where students practise the analytical skills the discipline rewards.
The aim, across every course, is the one the department sets for itself: graduates who can imagine beyond the given, reason with care, and carry the values of democratic life into whatever they do next.
Contact
For matters relating to coursework, tutorials, references or academic collaboration, the department office is the best point of contact during term time.