Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is a premier institute of science and technology established in 2008. IITH has been consistently ranked in the&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/reports/" rel="noopener noreferrer">top 10 institutes</a>&nbsp;in India for Engineering&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nirfindia.org/2021/EngineeringRanking.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to NIRF</a>&nbsp;making it one of the most coveted schools for science and technology in the country.

IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/under-graduate/">undergraduate programs</a>&nbsp;in all the classical engineering disciplines, applied sciences, design, as well as several modern interdisciplinary areas. Students are given a flexibility to explore a broad set of areas, and potentially pursue a minor or double major in a discipline that is not their own. Students who wish to seek a deeper understanding of their own discipline are strongly encouraged to get involved in cutting-edge research with the help of a faculty to mentor them, and earn an Honors in their own field.

The very foundation of IIT Hyderabad is based on&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/">research and innovation</a>. The vibrant research culture is evident from the number of patents and publications that IITH produces consistently every year. IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/programmes-offered/">graduate programs</a>&nbsp;at both a masters, and a doctoral level, in several diverse areas. There are separate programs for technology, design, science, and liberal arts. The&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/post-graduate/">MTech program</a>&nbsp;is offered in various modes and durations to cater to the ever-growing need of postgraduate level professionals in the country.

IITH encourages and supports&nbsp;<a href="https://iic-iith.netlify.app/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">innovation and entrepreneurship</a>&nbsp;at every stage. The minor program in entrepreneurship is open to all students of IITH, and many of the courses are offered by industrialists who are entrepreneurs themselves. There are various&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/centres-incubators/">innovation centers and incubators</a>&nbsp;that promote entrepreneurship and help mentor young innovators. IITH has been very successful in building tie-ups with leading academic institutions around the globe.

IITH enjoys a very special relationship with Japanese universities and industries that goes beyond academic and research collaborations. In fact, some of the iconic buildings in IITH campus will carry the signature of Japanese architecture.

IITH creates a unique holistic ecosystem for education that offers interactive learning, a very flexible academic structure, cutting-edge research, strong industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is an environment which enables students and faculty to translate their dreams into realities.

IIT Hyderabad

Department of Liberal Arts

Interactions

Aalok Khandekar

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures. © 2021 Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Science and Technology Studies

Moving Ethnography: Infrastructuring Doubletakes and Switchbacks in Experimental Collaborative Methods

Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science

Vasudhaiva kutumbakam: Family in the knowledge economy

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: Family in the Knowledge Economy

In the summer of 2011, in the wake of some of Indias worst corruption scandals, a civil society group calling itself India Against Corruption was mobilizing unprecedented nation-wide support for the passage of a strong Jan Lokpal (Citizens Ombudsman) Bill by the Indian Parliament. The movement was, on its face, unusual: its figurehead, the 75-year-old Gandhian, Anna Hazare, was apparently rallying urban, middle-class professionals and youth in great numbers - a group otherwise notorious for its political apathy. The scale of the protests, of the scandals spurring them, and the intensity of media attention generated nothing short of a spectacle: the sense, if not the reality, of a united India Against Corruption. Against this background, we ask: what shared imagination of corruption and political dysfunction, and what political ends are projected in the Lokpal protests? What are the class practices gathered under the "middle-class" rubric, and how do these characterize the unusual politics of summer 2011? Wholly permeated by routine habits of consumption, we argue that the Lokpal protests are fundamentally structured by the impulse to remake social relations in the image of products and "India" itself into a trusted brand. Taking "corruption" as a site at which the middle class discursively constitutes itself, we trace the idioms and mechanisms by which the Lokpal agitation re-articulates the very terms of politics, citizenship, and democracy in contemporary India. © SAGE Publications.

Journal of Consumer Culture

An Indian summer: Corruption, class, and the Lokpal protests

In this essay, I examine 'Education Abroad'- the large-scale migration of engineering students from India to the USA for seeking graduate education. I argue that Education Abroad in contemporary India is articulated at the intersection of multiple factors at different scales. These include imaginations of successful careers and lifestyles as well as frustrations with state-sponsored higher education in India - factors which, in turn, are themselves located within particular histories of (post)colonialism, developmentalism, and more recently, neoliberalism. Drawing on historical analysis and ethnographic research conducted among engineering students in Mumbai, India, and various parts of the USA, I trace ways in which Indian engineers make sense of and navigate through the intersections of these various historical and contemporary currents and the particular shape of Education Abroad that emerges as a result. Moreover, I suggest, in pursuing Education Abroad, these engineers inadvertently undermine the very systems of higher education of which they are legacy beneficiaries. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Engineering Studies

Education Abroad: engineering, privatization, and the new middle class in neoliberalizing India

&nbsp;This chapter analyzes the processes through which coherent claims about global identities are articulated. It argues that invocations of scale, such as the global, are contingent: they become meaningful in specific historical and cultural contexts. Two sets of media productions—“Global Indian” branding commercials and representations of “Hapa” identities centered in North America—constitute the empirical basis of the analysis. The chapter proposes that the construction of global identities is gainfully interrogated through the notions of scale-making processes 1 and remediation 2 : understanding media representations of global identities as remediated, scale-making processes disrupt straightforward conceptions of media and draw attention to the ways in which they are embedded in specific historical and cultural contexts. The chapter brings together theories of remediation and scale-making processes to highlight the ways in which particular imaginations of scale and media forms are choreographed into coherent articulations. In doing so, it also offers a methodological contribution toward analyzing claims to the “global.