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 paper explores how religious beliefs influence meaning-making and prosocial action among community responders. Fourteen non-professional rescue and relief volunteers were interviewed post the 2018-19 floods in Kerala, India. The study adopts Braun and Clarke's Thematic Analysis with a critical realist approach. Several participants viewed the disaster as an act of God but simultaneously engaged in scientific sense-making; religious meaning-making offers a means of coming to terms, while rational causal attributions promote mitigation measures. Suffering was seen as a test of faith. Many volunteers experienced the disaster as a reminder that re-oriented them to piety and iterated human vulnerability. Although the disaster evoked a lack of control, they found meaning in the service of others and viewed their actions with humility and gratitude. Service was often both intrinsically meaningful and religiously motivated. The findings underscore the role of religious meaning-making in promoting prosocial action and community resilience post disasters. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

World University root node

Mental Health, Religion and Culture

Religious meaning-making and prosocial action among disaster response volunteers

Natural language meaning has properties of both (embodied) cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures. But it is not clear how they actually relate to one another. This article argues that how properties of cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning can be united remains one of the puzzles in cognitive science. That is primarily because formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning are abstract, logical, and truth-conditional properties, whereas cognitive/conceptual representations are embodied and grounded in sensory-motor systems. After reviewing the current progress, this work offers, in outline, the general formulations that show how these two different kinds of representations for semantic structures can (potentially) be unified and also proposes three desiderata for testing, in brain dynamics, the mathematical equivalence between formal symbolic representations (and their transitions), and neuronal population codes (and their transitions). © 2022 Cognitive Science Society LLC.

Cognitive Science

The Puzzling Chasm Between Cognitive Representations and Formal Structures of Linguistic Meanings

This article will present a critique of the neurocentric view of language and cognition by locating it within the context of unification in cognitive science. While unity consists in the integration of the constraints, contents, and operations of various levels or scales of organization of the cognitive system, it contrasts with disunity. Disunity emanates from variations in structure and content at any level of the cognitive system that gives rise to significant and often unique differences in experience, appearance, form, and organiza-tion of a cognitive phenomenon at the given level. This happens when the given level is looked at in greater detail. For instance, the gap in the organizational character between a cognitive schema for reasoning how and whether to travel and its account in terms of neuronal activation patterns reflects disunity. Many neurobiological accounts of language aim at the integration of the cognitive organization of language with the neuronal structures at bottom in order to achieve unity, but disunity arises from the special nature of the symbolic/cognitive properties of natural language which are argued to reside neither in the brain nor in the environment alone most plausibly because they are emergent patterns between designated brain states and various kinds of linguistic experience. The proposal that is advanced and then defended with special reference to language–biology relations employs Haugeland’s (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1978, 1, 215) notion of dimensions and levels, and thereby emphasizes that unity and disunity can coexist in an explanatory union but from different perspectives and orientations © 2021 American Psychological Association

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

Disunity With Unity in Cognition Within the Context of Language–Biology Relations

This paper revisits the conception of intelligence and understanding as embodied in the Turing Test. It argues that a simple system of meaning relations drawn from words/lexical items in a natural language and framed in terms of syntax-free relations in linguistic texts can help ground linguistic inferences in a manner that can be taken to be 'understanding' in a mechanized system. Understanding in this case is a matter of running through the relevant inferences meaning relations allow for, and some of these inferences are plain deductions and some can serve to act as abductions. Understanding in terms of meaning relations also supervenes on linguistic syntax because such understanding cannot be simply reduced to syntactic relations. The current approach to meaning and understanding thus shows that this is one way, if not the only way, of (re)framing Alan Turing's original insight into the nature of thinking in computing systems. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature.

Axiomathes

Meaning Relations, Syntax, and Understanding

Questions are raised about an approach towards psychiatric epidemiology, which directly imports models in medicine to count disorders of the mind to produce staggering evidence to the effect that 11% of Indians suffer from mental disorders. An alternative psychiatric epidemiology is needed, which relies on the principles of slow research, is value-based, and which defines mental health as an ethical and political problem. © 2022 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Economic and Political Weekly

A Mental Health Epidemic?: Critical Questions on the National Mental Health Survey

This essay considers three unexplored late novels by Joyce Carol Oates, namely, Man Crazy, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and Little Bird of Heaven which powerfully represent negative father complex through fictional daughters who struggle to escape the shadow of their overbearing daddies. It examines how the daughters–Ingrid, Rebecca, and Krista–hailing from disenfranchised backgrounds and broken families endure traumatic circumstances as a result of their father fixation and often develop self-effacing and masochistic tendencies. Further, it analyses how the atrophied psyche of these daughters upon losing the father compels them to go searching for surrogate daddies and predictably invite catastrophic outcomes. It then turns its focus on how by reconnecting with their hitherto unavailable mothers, Oates’ daughters undergo an integral female rite of passage to eventually overcome their psychological conditioning and attain independence and self-actualization. By drawing upon Jungian theories and feminist psychoanalysis, this essay therefore treats negative father complex as a disturbing yet necessary element in Oates’ novels, especially her underrated late novels. Finally, this essay argues that by overcoming their daddies Oates’ fictional daughters not only conquer their psychological demons but also attest to the author’s liberal feminist sensibility by moving from chaos to clarity. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction

Overcoming Daddy: The Daughter’s Rite of Passage in Joyce Carol Oates’ Late Novels

Unlocking Private Investment in Sustainable Infrastructure in Asia

Does Infrastructure investment lead to economic growth?: Evidence from central Asian countries

Research on women’s labor in the informal sector largely tends to focus on the ex-ploitation of women through intense and prolonged physical work, extra work hours, wage disparities, work irregularities, and financial insecurity. With respect to micro-finance in particular, the question has often been about whether microfinance initiatives work to empower women and redress gender inequalities. In line with previous scholarship on the complex and contextual nature of power, this paper takes a mi-cro-level perspective, focusing on the specific reasons that push women into the informal sector and their strategies to deal with everyday challenges. We draw from an ethnographic study of women working in Kudumbashree, a women’s empowerment program in Kerala that helps women start microenterprises supported by microcredits. Our research found that Kudumbashree tends to privilege women who can make the most of opportunities to work from or near the home. Setting up a workspace from home or working near the house is important for the flexibility it provides women by allowing them to earn without compromising their everyday family responsibilities. Additionally, working in an all-woman environment in a familiar neighborhood is advantageous. This paper draws on the findings of an ethnographic study to unpack the concept of vulnerability. Within the heteronormative family structure, vulnerability emerges as a complex phenomenon that is negotiated. On the one hand, informal work is often viewed in terms of the exploitative working conditions and gender discrimination in society. On the other hand, despite the less-than-ideal working con-ditions, by becoming an earning member of the family, over time, women are able to establish relationships beyond the family, thereby improving their access to resources and networks. When seen from the perspective of wellbeing, then, con-textualized in the specific locations of women, we find that microfinance initiatives such as Kudumbashree enable women to negotiate their challenges and attenuate their vulnerabilities through the development of strategies, networks, and resources in solid-arity with others. © 2022, Research Institute of Asian Women. All rights reserved.

Asian Women

Informal Work from Home: Understanding Vulnerability and Well-being among Women in Kudumbashree Microenterprises

Exposure to extreme shocks in early life is found to have a lasting impact in adulthood. Exploiting the variation in exposure measured by age and intensity of an earthquake, we evaluate the impact of a 7.7MW earthquake in Gujarat, India, on the health stock of children who were in utero or below three years. Using the India Human Development Survey data from 2004-05 and earthquake intensity data, we find an affected girl child to be shorter by at least 2.5 cm at the age of 3-6 years. The earthquake seems to have destroyed the household infrastructures and health facilities, affecting the expecting mothers and newborn children. The households using services to meet nutritional needs of children and pregnant women seem to be least affected. Our findings recommend faster reconstruction activities and highlight the importance of universal healthcare and nutritional delivery services to mitigate the impacts of early-life shocks. © 2022 Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Fulltext

Environment and Development Economics

Lasting impact on health from natural disasters, potential mechanisms andmitigating effects

In this study, we investigate the impact of energy poverty on macroeconomic variables. In particular, this study focuses on the technological threshold-based energy poverty approach due to its merits over other techniques to explore the dynamic link between ecological footprint and energy poverty in sub-Saharan African countries from 1995 to 2018. To do so, this study uses second-generation panel unit root and panel cointegration tests. First, the results derived from the cointegration tests reveal the existence of a long-run relationship among the selected variables. Second, this study applies both the random effect model and fully modified ordinary least squares estimates to calculate the long-run elasticities. The results obtained from the above tests indicate that energy poverty significantly reduces the ecological footprint; however, it does not affect the economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, from a policy perspective, developing countries can target energy poverty as a development indicator for protecting the environment. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.