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

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to foreground the importance of context in discourse analysis by drawing on a study of online gender talk on Facebook in India. Design/methodology/approach: Using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), this study explored participants’ use of language to construct and perform various identities in online gender talk. This study discusses the methods used and challenges in analyzing digital spaces through FDA, focusing specifically on the importance of an ethnographic perspective to contextualize online talk. Findings: Engagement with the larger socio-cultural context of the subject of study through various data collection methods enhanced our understanding of the contexts behind text. It helped the authors to explore the data from multiple directions from a Foucauldian framework. This study found that people constructed a “progressive” identity when talking about gender on Facebook. Originality/value: There are very few studies combining discourse analysis and digital ethnography and this paper seeks to do that. Digital ethnography helps to look beyond the text and locate text in the larger socio-cultural context. To emphasize the importance of context in discourse analysis, this study engages with both online and offline data as online talk is connected with offline contexts in many significant ways. In this paper, the authors provide a description on various methodological steps used to collect and analyze online data using FDA. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

World University root node

Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society

From texts to contexts: the relevance of digital ethnography in a Foucauldian discourse analysis of online gender talk in Kerala

In this article I focus on media narratives on older women bearing and birthing infants through the intervention of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in rural north India. I suggest that their portrayal as “outliers” within popular media narratives is gendered, and connected in particular to: the fear of older women past their reproductive prime becoming pregnant and birthing children through ART; the figure of the “rogue doctor,” or the emergence of counter narratives around ART and its practitioners; and, the effort to quell anxieties around ART use amongst older women through the use of legitimating tropes such as conjugality. © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness

Outliers and Rogue Doctors: Manufacturing “Anxiety” Around Older Mothers in India

In this chapter, I seek to explore the conflicts inherent in the process of assisted reproduction such as IVF. The paradox of assisted reproduction in India lies in its continued use of women, and men, belonging to particular socio-economic strata to birth for other social strata. This form of stratified reproduction is also re-enacted in the process of extracting and valuing eggs donated by egg provider brought in from poorer parts of India. The visualisation of kinship in the assisted reproductive technology clinic enacts a script of de-kinning in dealing with the gametes and production of a future child. I suggest that de-kinning happens through the visual medium of the ultrasound that attempts to delineate, extract, and depersonalise the bodily substance that is crucial to the making of children and kinship. Here, the clinician's gaze is the most important source of engagement, with the rhetoric that accompanies clinic documents. By analysing the gaze that the clinician employs during these processes, this chapter tries to understand the ways in which infertility medicine seeks to create kin artificially, as it simultaneously seeks to undo many of the processes involved. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Mizuho Matsuo, Sae Nakamura and Kenta Funahashi; individual chapters, the contributors.

Life, Illness, and Death in Contemporary South Asia: Living through the Age of Hope and Precariousness

Conceiving De-kinning: Practices of Pre-birthing in IVF Clinics in India

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as an important investment avenue in the past few years. Investors are increasingly interested in these currencies amid surging financial returns. In this context, understanding market efficiency of cryptocurrency has become very crucial for investors and academicians. The price–volume framework is a popular approach in financial economics to understand the market efficiency of stocks in the stock markets. Therefore, this article examines the market efficiency of cryptocurrencies through price–volume framework to understand whether crypto market is predictable. Towards this objective, data on both return and trading volume (TV) of the top eight cryptocurrencies are used for the period 8 August 2015–20 October 2022. As an empirical method, both linear and non-linear causality models are used to validate the hypothesis. Our results confirm that TV cannot predict the cryptocurrencies' return, thereby validating the market efficiency hypothesis. Furthermore, we divide the sample according to the structural break period. The result from the post-break period analysis also confirms the presence of market efficiency in the recent period for all currencies, barring XRP, XMR and DASH.

International Journal of Finance and Economics

Market efficiency of the cryptocurrencies: Some new evidence based on price–volume relationship

The biological foundations of language reflect assumptions about the way language and biology relate to one another, and with the rise of biological studies of language, we appear to have come closer to a deep understanding of linguistic cognition–the part of cognition constituted by language. This article argues that relations of neurobiological and genetic instantiation between linguistic cognition and the underlying biological substrate are ultimately irrelevant to understanding the higher-level structure and form of language. Linguistic patterns and those that make up the character of cognition constituted by language do not simply arise from the biological substrate because higher-level structures typically assume forms based on constraints that only emerge once these new levels are constructed. The goal is not to show how the mapping problem between linguistic cognition and neurobiology can be solved. Rather, the goal is to show the mapping problem ceases to exist once a different understanding of language-(neuro)biology relations is embraced. With this goal, this article first uncovers a number of logical and conceptual fallacies in strategies deployed in understanding language-(neuro)biology relations. After having shown these flaws, the article offers an alternative view of language-biology relations that shows how biological constraints shape language (nature and form), making it what it is. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science

A Critical Perspective on the (Neuro)biological Foundations of Language and Linguistic Cognition

We empirically examine whether violation of hypergamy—which occurs when the wife's economic status equals or exceeds that of her husband's—causally affects domestic violence using microdata from India. Identifying the causal effect of hypergamy violation on domestic violence, however, is challenging due to unmeasured confounding and reverse causality. To overcome these difficulties, we utilize a non-parametric bounds approach. Employing this approach, we find strong evidence that violation of hypergamy leads to a significant increase in domestic violence. Furthermore, we provide suggestive evidence that this result arises because violation of hypergamy is likely to undermine patriarchal beliefs and norms about gender roles, and also because it is likely to increase men's likelihood of using domestic violence as an instrument to sabotage their wives' labour market prospects. Our findings suggest that policies that seek to empower women and promote gender equality might paradoxically increase women's exposure to domestic violence. © 2022 Royal Statistical Society.

Fulltext

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society

Don't cross the line: Bounding the causal effect of hypergamy violation on domestic violence in India

In this paper, I explore the narratives on the administration of assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatments amongst ageing men and women who are past their ‘reproductive prime’. I use the phrase ‘past their reproductive prime’ with caution as ART has the capability to resurrect the desire, quest and conception of children amongst these ageing women and men. In rural agrarian Haryana in North India, ART panders to, and provides, potent narratives for perpetuation of the patrilineage for genetic continuity through the male line. The administration of ART treatments to this particular demographic is undertaken through the ‘operation’ of two particular forms of discourse: the desire for genetic perpetuity, and the pursuit of sons. In this enterprise, the aged pregnant body becomes an important trope of resurrecting childless marriages, evidenced by the secrecy surrounding the use of donated sperm, and the open rejection of adoption. Through an exploration of conceptualizations of pregnancy, age and legislation in India, I present the argument that ART supports the pursuit of genetic connectedness by resurrecting the social importance of genetic connectedness through sons and the pregnant wife. In this paper, I purposely engage with elements of the study of kinship and family in South Asia to undertake an analysis of how ART is used as part of a larger social narrative around conception and pregnancy amongst older married couples. © 2021

Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online

Conceptualizing aged reproduction: genetic connectedness, son preference and assisted reproduction in North India

This article assesses the nexus between export, productivity, and competitiveness in the Indian manufacturing sector. To do this, we examine the “learning by exporting” and “self-selection” hypotheses using firm-level data relating to Indian manufacturing firms relating to period from 1994 to 2017. The empirical analysis supports the “learning by exporting” hypothesis, but does not support the “self-selection” hypothesis. We also investigate the impact of export on competitiveness, and the results indicate a positive relationship. These findings remain consistent when we segregate manufacturing firms based on industries, intensity use of labor and capital, and firm ownership. In the light of these findings, we recommend that policy focus on enhancing the export capacity of manufacturing firms to further strengthen the competitiveness of Indian manufacturing. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

Journal of Asian Economics

Nexus between export, productivity, and competitiveness in the Indian manufacturing sector

Objective: To explore Indian cancer patients’ and their primary family caregivers’ (PFC) experiences and expectations of treatment-related communication with their physician while undergoing radiation therapy. Methods: Participants, comprising patient-PFC dyads (n = 32), patients only (n = 33) and PFC only (n = 7), were recruited from one hospital in Mumbai, India. Semi-structured interviews explored participants’ perceived role in cancer-related decision-making, diagnosis and prognosis communication experiences with the physician, communication expectations of their treating physician, and information needs. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed using the framework approach. Results: Main themes included: (i) patients’ passive role in treatment communication, (ii) family as an integral part of the medical consultation, and (iii) dyads’ expectations and beliefs about the role of the physician. Conclusion: Indian cancer patients played a passive role in treatment decision-making while physicians were seen as primary medical decision-makers. Further, PFCs provided the final consent for the treatment plan and acted as a mediator/moderator between the patient-physician. Practice implications: These findings suggest the need for (i) interventions such as question prompt lists that may improve patient activation and caregiver preparedness, and (ii) triadic communication training interventions for optimal communication between the three stakeholders (i.e., patient, physician and PFC). © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Patient Education and Counseling

Treatment-related communication experiences and expectations among Indian cancer patients receiving radiation therapy and their family members: A qualitative study

Background: Parents of children with neurological disorders commonly report having unmet needs related to their child's care. Mixed methods research is needed with parents of children with neurological disorders in India in order to: 1) quantify which needs are unmet and under-met, and 2) qualitatively explore how parents perceive their unmet and under-met needs. Methods: This concurrent mixed-methods study used a convergence model of triangulation design. Parents of children with neurological disorders receiving treatment in a children's hospital in Hyderabad, India completed questionnaires (n = 205) on unmet/under-met needs. Twenty-five of these parents then completed in-depth interviews exploring experiential aspects of unmet needs. Results: Quantitative analysis suggested that education about the child's illness and medical needs were the most frequent unmet needs. Parents needed their child's condition explained to them (91.7%) and greater continuity of their child's care (85.4%). Qualitative analysis suggested that parents reported struggling to find a specialist who was knowledgeable about their child's condition. Though parents living in rural areas quantitatively reported fewer unmet needs (child's medical care, care coordination, and communication) than parents living in the city (B = 0.92 [95%CI = 0.64,1.20] for medical care needs), the qualitative data showed this may be due to lower expectations from the health system. Conclusion: Parents of children with neurological disorders in India frequently report unmet and under-met needs. Practice implications: Community-based interventions coupled with training nurses on information provision could help bridge the gap between what is offered by hospital systems, and what is needed by parents, in terms of information and support. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.