Department of Liberal Arts

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 article examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel’s intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text’s telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel’s slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness. © 2021 Regents of the University of Colorado

World University root node

English Language Notes

The war that never happened: Horror and History in Mark Z. Danielewski’s house of leaves

This study examines the causal effect of women’s age at marriage on prevalence of domestic violence using newly available household data from India. The paper employs an empirical strategy that utilizes variation in age at menarche to obtain exogenous variation in women’s age at marriage. The results show robust evidence that a one-year delay in women’s marriage causes a significant decline in physical violence, although it has no impact on sexual or emotional violence. Further, the study provides suggestive evidence that the effect of women’s marital age on physical violence arises because older brides, as compared to younger brides, are more educated and are married to more educated men. Overall, the findings underscore the importance of better enforcement of existing social policies that seek to delay marriages of women, as well as formulation of newer interventions, to reduce the prevalence of domestic violence in developing countries. HIGHLIGHTS The study examines the causal effect of marital age on exposure to domestic violence. It utilizes recent household data from India. Variation in age at menarche is used to obtain exogenous variation in age at marriage. Results show one-year delay in women's marriage causes a decline in physical violence. The study conducts further analysis to shed light on underlying mechanisms. © 2021 IAFFE.

Fulltext

Feminist Economics

The Causal Impact of Women’s Age at Marriage on Domestic Violence in India

Motor skill retention is typically measured by asking participants to reproduce previously learned movements from memory. The analog of this retention test (recall memory) in human verbal memory is known to underestimate how much learning is actually retained. Here we asked whether information about previously learned movements, which can no longer be reproduced, is also retained. Following visuomotor adaptation, we used tests of recall that involved reproduction of previously learned movements and tests of recognition in which participants were asked whether a candidate limb displacement, produced by a robot arm held by the subject, corresponded to a movement direction that was experienced during active training. The main finding was that 24 h after training, estimates of recognition memory were about twice as accurate as those of recall memory. Thus, there is information about previously learned movements that is not retrieved using recall testing but can be accessed in tests of recognition. We conducted additional tests to assess whether, 24 h after learning, recall for previously learned movements could be improved by presenting passive movements as retrieval cues. These tests were conducted immediately prior to recall testing and involved the passive playback of a small number of movements, which were spread across the workspace and included both adapted and baseline movements, without being marked as such. This technique restored recall memory for movements to levels close to those of recognition memory performance. Thus, somatic information may enable retrieval of otherwise inaccessible motor memories. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Current Biology

Recognition memory for human motor learning

Objective: To assess the Common Sense Model among parents of children with neurological disorders, by determining the prevalence of symptoms of anxiety and depression, and how illness perceptions relate to symptoms of anxiety and depression both directly, and indirectly via coping. Design: 205 parents of children with neurological disorders in Hyderabad, India completed questionnaires. Main Outcome Measures: Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire and Coping Health Inventory for Parents. We used multiple regressions and PROCESS for SPSS to assess direct and indirect relationships. Results: Mild to severe symptoms of anxiety (41.0%) and depression (39.5%) were common. Symptoms of anxiety and/or depression were related to perceived treatment control over the illness, perceived understanding of the illness, perceived personal control over the illness (anxiety only), and perceived timeline of the illness (depression only). The coping strategy ‘maintaining social support’ mediated the relationship between symptoms of depression and four illness perceptions: perceived consequences (95%CI=.03,-.21), timeline (95%CI=.01,-.25), perceived personal control (95%CI=.02-.24), and treatment control (95%CI=.01-.34). Conclusion: Our findings have implications for education interventions to improve community attitudes of child neurological disorders. Such interventions may allow families’ social networks to provide more support to parents, which could aid parents’ coping strategies. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Psychology and Health

Psychological outcomes, coping and illness perceptions among parents of children with neurological disorders

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

This article examines the impact of innovation on labour productivity by using latest World Bank Enterprise Surveys data and compares the results between Chinese and Indian manufacturing sector. The article uses cross-section data based on two surveys that were conducted by the World Bank in 2012 and 2014 for China and India, respectively. By employing simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression technique, we find that innovation affects the labour productivity positively for Chinese as well as Indian manufacturing firms, but its impact on firm productivity is relatively weak in case of India as compared to China. Second, other factors such as average wage of the workers, education of production workers and training do significantly boost the labour productivity of Chinese manufacturing firms as well as for Indian firms. Third, our results based on firm size also indicate that the impact of innovation activities on labour productivity is higher in case of large firms as compared to medium firms. However, innovation does not affect the labour productivity of small manufacturing firms for both China and India. In terms of policy, it is important for both Chinese and Indian manufacturing firms to keep pursuing innovation activities, in order to spur productivity, which would strengthen firms’ growth. © 2020 SAGE Publications.

Science, Technology and Society

Innovation and Firm-level Labour Productivity: A Comparison of Chinese and Indian Manufacturing Based on Enterprise Surveys

This paper investigates the nexus among employment, labor productivity and trade openness in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS), and Indonesia using annual data (1991-2018). The results suggest a long-run relationship among the variables but only in the agricultural sector of these economies. We also find a unidirectional causality running from employment to productivity in only the agricultural sector. Similarly, trade openness also Granger causes employment. Our final result indicates that trade openness positively influences labor productivity in the long-run. From a policy perspective, it is imperative for BRICS and Indonesia to target employment generation by promoting trade openness. © 2020 Buletin Ekonomi Moneter dan Perbankan. All rights reserved.

Buletin Ekonomi Moneter dan Perbankan

The nexus among employment, productivity and trade openness: Evidence from brics and Indonesia

This paper investigates the relationship between optimum government size and economic growth using data of Indian states during 1990-91 to 2017–18. Our results derived from panel threshold regression model show a positive and significant impact of government size on economic growth within the estimated thresholds for both aggregate and sub-panels based on income and regions. Once the government size moves above the upper threshold level, then its impact declines and turns to be insignificant. Thus, our findings suggest the policymakers for maintaining the government size within the thresholds limit. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Economic Modelling

Optimum government size and economic growth in case of Indian states: Evidence from panel threshold model

This study examines the stochastic conditional convergence of per capita energy consumption in India by considering the types of energy consumption as well as energy consumption at sectoral levels, covering the annual data from 1971 to 2017. To do so, this study applies the two-step Lagrange Multiplier (LM), and the three-step Residual Augmented Least Square LM (RALS-LM) unit root tests, which accommodate up to two endogenously determined structural breaks. Our results reveal the evidence of per capita energy convergence for various types of energy consumption in the presence of two endogenous breaks. Further, we disaggregate each type of energy consumption based on their use in different sectors. The results derived from LM and RALS-LM unit root tests again support the convergence, barring a few sectors. Our findings give an indication to the government of India for adjusting the types of energy consumption to reach the carbon emission target and increase efficiency for a few sectors where we find divergence. © 2020 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland