HYDERABAD: “As a vice-chancellor, aspects that fascinate me the most include organizing, attending and presiding over a research conference; it may be regional, national or international. I consider research moot as a great learning opportunity and an excellent platform to meet new people and develop academic and professional networking; a significant way of enhancing knowledge,” said Prof. Dr. Fateh Burfat during his address in inaugural ceremony of first three-day international conference on the theme of “Contemporary Sociology, Social Sciences and Sustainable Development 2018”
He said that the conferences served as excellent platforms not only for researchers but for policy-makers, teachers, students and scholars to acquire new perspectives, ideas and latest trends.
“As a sociologist, I am glad to share with you that sociology has more than 600 branches today. Sociology pervades human life as a whole. Let it be an individual, an institution, a society-let it be customs, traditions, health, development, backwardness, rites, rituals and life styles-let it be human behavior, decisions, plans and attitudes; all these have a sociological background as well as a sociological foreground. In order to understand entire phenomena in the said areas, one needs to understand sociological motivations behind each of them,” he said.
He congratulated his guests.
Chief guest HANDS Chief Executive Dr. Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed said that sociology was essentially all about social development through sensitive and improved understanding of social dynamics of any given society. “To me, development principally means ‘human development’. Any progress which does not include human happiness and elevation; or does not add to human joys, comforts, health, well being, emotional delight, spiritual ecstasy, financial uplift, knowledge escalation and personal freedom and contentment will, in my view, not qualify to be called as ‘development'”, Mr. Shaikh explained.
The first Keynote Speaker of the session YU Xiahofeng of Zhejiang University of China spoke about the sociological aspects of individual, institutional, organizational, regional, national, international and gender aspects of security; outlining sociological security in traditional and non-traditional types-recommending future research on the spoken areas.
The second speaker of the session Dr. Gul Muhammad Baloch from Malaysia spoke regarding health hazards of sociology. He said that human health depended largely upon sociological setup of societies inhabited by men; stressing that every society casts some particular implications on human nature, temperament, disposition, attitude and behavior. “Understanding such sociological dimensions was imperative towards understanding why particular individual or groups behaved the way they did”, he remarked.
The third speaker Prof. Dr. Sivapalan Selvadurai talked about the economics of sociology. He said that many developing countries were constructing their own social protection policies. Despite the difference, social protection pathways shared common features. He added that social protection response in middle income countries in the wake of Asian economic crisis in the 1997 and the global financial crisis in 2008 mandated the countries to specify their security needs under sociological perspective, and at the same time convey to them a loud and clear message that they should not just be focus on the economy but it needed to transform its social policy.
At the end, souvenir shields were distributed among foreign and national scholars, presenters, faculty, organizers and volunteers jointly by VC-SU Dr. Fateh Muhammad Burfat and Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences Prof. Dr. Nagina Parveen Soomro.
Published in Daily Times, March 24th 2018.