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

This book reflects on the methodological challenges and possibilities encountered when researching practices that have been historically defined and classified as ‘craft.’ It fosters an understanding of how methodology, across disciplines, contributes to analytical frameworks within which the subject matter of craft is defined and constructed. The contributions are written by scholars whose work focuses on different craft practices across geographies. Each chapter contains detailed case study material along with theoretical analysis of the research challenges confronted. They provide valuable insight into how methodologies emerge in response to particular research conditions and contexts, addressing issues of decolonization, representation, institutionalization, and power. Informed by anthropology, art history and design, this volume facilitates interdisciplinary discussion and touches on some of the most critical issues related to craft research today.

Department of Liberal Arts

World University root node

Encountering Craft: Methodological Approaches from Anthropology, Art History, and Design

With minimal access to legal protections, support, and exploitative conditions, Malayali women domestic workers in the Gulf struggle to forge meaningful connections and a sense of home in the UAE. This study aims to understand the experiences and perspectives of Malayali women, with a specific focus on the ways in which their idea of home and belonging are shaped by factors such as identity, diaspora, gender, and motherhood. The work also intends to comprehend how a sense of belonging helps the women to navigate through the sense of grief, guilt, and shame. Through their narratives, the article exposes how the migration of Malayali women domestic workers entail losing belonging, occupying liminal spaces, and relinquishing home. © 2023 Asian Center for Women's Studies, Ewha Womans University.

Asian Journal of Women's Studies

Being a Khaddama: Narratives of home, belonging and identity for women domestic workers in the Gulf

This article looks at how adoption law prescribes correct contexts for the legitimate movement of children. It is specifically an analysis of the Adoption Regulation of India, 2017, and the Juvenile Justice Act 2015, and the way in which they warrant three kinds of movement of children through adoption: ‘abandonment’/’surrender’, ‘return’ and ‘giving and taking’. By investigating the precise way in which law formulates definition of these terms, this article attempts to understand how legal terminology comes to affect the kind of sites that the biological family, the state and the adoptive family end up becoming. © The Author(s) 2021.

Journal of Family Issues

How Does Law Prescribe Circulation of Children? Understanding Different Kinds of Movement Within the Adoption Law in India

This article is based on ethnography of a performance-narration of the Jambavantaru Puranam, the etiological tale of the Madiga community in Telangana, south India. The piece focuses on changes in the technologies of production and conditions of reception of the Jambavantaru Puranam. By documenting contemporary ways of telling and internalizing folk narratives, this article contextualizes these changes within the way performers are able to interpret their location within the contemporary, and the way the audience-community are able to move between a local and historical identity of being Madiga and a larger and political identity of being Dalit. © 2022 National Communication Association.

Text and Performance Quarterly

Old tales through new images and new tales through old images: ethnography of a Jambavantaru katha (narrative) performance in Telangana

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Book Review

The Geographical Indications of India Act requires a detailed description of ‘authorized users’ and ‘producers’ without concern for how these ‘producers’/ ‘authorized users’ are identified and what are the outcomes of such identification. Artisans identified as producers of GI registered ‘Cheriyal Painting’ of Telangana primarily belong to one genetically related family. Apart from members of the Danalakota household, GI also enumerates families of apprentices as ‘producers’. This article will highlight two things. First, it will demonstrate the way in which identification of ‘producers’/ ‘authorized users’ replicates not only the relational worlds within which producers exist but also the ‘obligations and moral imperatives’ embedded within those relations. Second, identifying oneself as a ‘producer’/ ‘authorized user’ requires distinguishing and individualizing one’s relatedness with the Danalakota family; promises of welfare by the state then become accessible only by becoming kin and distinguishing oneself as kin. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Fulltext

Contemporary South Asia

Identifying ‘authorized users’, identifying kin: negotiating relational worlds through Geographical Indications registration

Mariner, Kathryn A. 2019. Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Anthropology Book Forum

Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States

This article examines the emerging trend of single-parent adoption in contemporary India. It describes how single men and women, through their desire for parenting-through-adoption, engage with different ways of authoring their sexualities and sexual agencies. Adoption law in India determines who is fit to be adopted, who is fit to adopt, and the right conditions for adoptions. This article simultaneously looks at how questions of sexuality are framed at the intersections of law, cultural constructions of heteronormativity and sexual health, and narratives of single-adoptive parents.

Adoption & Culture

Single Parent Adoption in Contemporary India: Addressing Questions Around Sexuality

<h2>Aarti Kawlra (with a foreword by Prasannan Parthasarathi). 2018. We Who Wove with Lotus Thread: Summoning Community in South India</h2>

Providing an ethnographic account of the everyday life of a household of artisans in the Telangana state of southern India, Chandan Bose engages with craft practice beyond the material (in this case, the region's characteristic murals, narrative cloth scrolls, and ritual masks and figurines). In situating the voice of the artisans themselves as the central focus of study, simultaneous and juxtaposing histories of craft practice emerge, through which artisans assemble narratives about work, home, and identity through multiple lenses. These perspectives include: the language artisans use to articulate their experience of materials, materiality, and the physical process of making; the shared and collective memory of practitioners through which they recount the genealogy of the practice; the everyday life of the household and its kinship practices, given the integration of the studio-space and the home-space; the negotiations between practitioners and the nation-state over matters of patronage; and the capacities of artisans to both conform to and affect the practices of the neo-liberal market. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019.

Perspectives on Work, Home, and Identity From Artisans in Telangana: Conversations Around Craft

Perspectives on work, home, and identity from artisans in telangana: Conversations around craft

This article explores how the practice of craft emerges through different contexts within which it is experienced. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with an artisanal household in the Telangana region of South India, this article focuses on the relationship between the household and the practice of craft in two distinct and interrelated ways. First, it reveals that the history of the practice of craft unfolds through the history of the household and its relational and hierarchical structures. Second, the household and collective performance among kin provide contexts for dialogue, exchange and ‘growth’, and, in the process, generate conditions for ‘critical making’. By looking at narratives of the members of the Danalakota household, the objective of the article is to reconstruct the experience of lived realities of craft and kinship.

World Art

Crafting objects, crafting affinities, crafting selves: narratives of home and craft from Telangana, India

The Geographical Indications (GI) of Goods is an internationally recognized form of intellectual property that legitimizes a product as "authentic" by linking it to its specific geographic site origin. As a part of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, which instituted the current GI framework, India enacted the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999. Based on ethnographic research in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh between 2012 and 2014, this article demonstrates how a market-driven search for authenticity also comes to define the identity of a practice and its producers, which are then deemed as "belonging" to this "site of origin." A hereditary style of narrative cloth paintings, which belonged to the repertoire of traditional skill of artists spread across the Telangana, has today been "branded" as Cheriyal paintings, after the village that is home to the only practicing artist community. By looking closely at certain requisites of the GI of Goods Act 1999 that need to be fulfilled for compliance prior to registration under the scheme, this article shows the ambiguities in the definition and expectation of GI's designation of "place" that are revealed through the community's everyday narratives about inheritance, practice and apprenticeship. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.