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 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.

World University root node

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

This study empirically analyzes the impact of public debt and cashless transactions on inflation in emerging market economies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research question is primarily motivated by the extensive fiscal spending and cashless transactions in these economies during the pandemic and the inflation spike in the mid of 2021. We use monthly data from 10 sample emerging market economies and panel vector auto-regressive models for analysis. Our findings show that (1) public debt has a positive impact on the inflation rate in the EMEs, and (2) cashless transaction exhibits a positive effect on overall inflation. (3) Further, cashless transactions and public debt are found to have a positive and significant impact on inflation in specific sectors such as Clothes and Footwear, Energy, and Transport. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade

Impact of Public Debt, Cashless Transactions on Inflation in Emerging Market Economies: Evidence from the COVID-19 Period

This paper examines the responses of credit and business cycle to various policy actions of the Government of Indonesia during the COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, the paper addresses two key questions (1) How do the credit and business cycle behave during the COVID-19 crisis in Indonesia? (2) Do the central bank and government policy responses effectively stabilize the credit and business cycle? Using the concordance Index and DCC-GARCH methodology, we found that the COVID-19 crisis increased Indonesia's credit and business cycle co-movements. Similarly, using the mixed data sampling regression technique, our findings suggest fiscal policy measures and government support help the business cycle revival during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the monetary policy transmission is weak during the pandemic © 2023 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland

Economic Analysis and Policy

Did the policy responses influence credit and business cycle co-movement during the COVID-19 crisis? Evidence from Indonesia

Cancer Research, Statistics, and Treatment

Talking about death and dying: A delicate balance between the physician, patient, and their family caregivers

This paper investigates the effect of Information Communication Technology (ICT) development on corruption in emerging market economies (EMEs). By employing a system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator in a dynamic panel data model, we find that ICT development reduces corruption. We have further disaggregated ICT Development into ICT Access and ICT Use. The findings show that ICT access is more effective in reducing the level of corruption as compared to ICT use. From a policy perspective, it is important for emerging countries to practice ICT as one of the tools for controlling corruption in the modern digital era. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Journal of the Knowledge Economy

The Linkage Between ICT Development and Corruption in the Case of Emerging Market Economies

In this chapter, I study Alankrita Shrivastava’s Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2020), and Bombay Begums (2021), to understand how her cultural productions explode the politics behind the scopophilic representation of female sexual desire by invoking certain widely marketed and frequently censored genres of erotic expression (erotic novels and app-based telephone sex) and then exposing their disturbing social underbelly where sexual violence resides. Shrivastava’s agentive female characters rupture these commercialized pulp sexual narratives and the fetishized figures of their heroines, replacing them with a far more problematic female voice of desire that speaks the truth about acquaintance sexual violence-a form of violence (marital rape, intimate partner sexual violence, sexual harassment, or intrafamilial sexual abuse) that is birthed by our misogynistic sexual culture and ignored by our legal structures. With reference to sociological and legal scholarship, I discuss how these works portray the distressing and unlegislated reality of acquaintance sexual violence-revealing the complex nature of sexual consent (which can be partial, subjective, and temporary), the varieties of nonconsensual sex (which can be unwanted/unwelcome even when not forced, and psychologically coercive even when not physically imposed), and the grimmer impact of acquaintance assault as compared to stranger rapes (Drakulich, Sociol Forum 30(1): 103-126, 2015). I will argue that this mordant critique is lodged in the new Indian Indie current-which, as critics have noted, spells the demise of the archvillain and transformation of the familiar ‘heroine’-and that it consequently stages socio-political intervention by demolishing the stereotypical ‘romantic hero’ and subversively projecting in his place the figures of the sexually desirous woman and the acquaintance rapist. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: Looking through their Gaze

“Rosy Ki Khwaheeshein”: Scripted Romance and Acquaintance Rape in Alankrita Shrivastava’s Oeuvre of Female Desire

This study investigates the effects of market concentration and diversification on firms’ performance in the case of the Indian chemical industry. The findings indicate a positive relationship between market concentration and performance measured in terms productivity and profitability. However, firm diversification shows a negative impact on a firm’s productivity and but positive impact on its profitability. The study also reveals that market concentration outperformed in comparison to the diversification strategy for the Indian chemical industry. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

Science, Technology and Society

Market Concentration, Diversification and Firm’s Performance in the Case of Indian Chemical Industry

The paper explores how chronicities and chronic relationships are fostered at a state-sponsored community psychiatry clinic that has been affiliated with a Sufi shrine in western India. The clinic provides free psychotropic treatment to patients, most of whom are pilgrims visiting the shrine. While the clinic has been lauded for its collaborative approach of blending ‘medicine and prayer’ in the provision of mental health care, observations of clinical encounters reflect the prevalence of a strongly medicalized perspective of mental illness, where local narratives of distress are reframed as globalized categories of mental disorder, thereby permitting pharmacological intervention. Importantly, in a context where free medicines are offered just as other freebies are in development initiatives in India, this results in the creation of long-term, ‘chronic’ relationships with patients who only seem to return for medicines, never recovering. This paper illustrates how ‘chronicity’, in many ways, is built into the project from the beginning itself. It becomes evident in the assumptions of the officials and psychiatrists that mental illness is chronic, in the case files of patients that record their consultation and medication histories, and in the clinical conversations about the importance of compliance to treatment. Given that historically, community mental health emerged in the context of reducing long hospital stays and deinstitutionalizing mental health care, it is important to reflect on how these policies and practices result in the creation of a cadre of chronic out-patients. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Anthropology and Medicine

Chronic relationships and mental health care: global pharmaceuticals in a local healing shrine in India

This special issue brings together five original research papers on chronic conditions in South Asian contexts with a view to rethink dominant discourses of risk, evidence and control surrounding the category of chronic conditions. Focusing on the multiple and contradictory (re)definitions of what counts as illness, specifically in the context of the rising burden of chronic illness, the papers in this issue deal with a range of health care practices from individual patients negotiating with ‘healthy diet’, to policy questions about the etiology of emerging disease burden and appropriateness of pharmaceutical interventions in ‘traditional’ sites of healing. While some of the chronic illnesses addressed in this special issue have received considerable attention from anthropologists (e.g. mental illness, diabetes), others, like leucorrhea have rarely been studied by anthropologists, despite the growing literature on ‘chronic illnesses’. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Chronic illness in South Asia: rethinking discourses of risk, evidence, and control

Fundamental tensions exist between formal-logical approaches and cognitive approaches to linguistic meaning. The divergence arises from the fundamental differences in nature and form between formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning and their cognitive representations. While the former are abstract and logical categories of representations, the latter are ultimately embodied and grounded in sensory-motor systems of the brain. This article aims to motivate a unifying theory/formalism of linguistic meaning from a general biologically integrative perspective in the context of current theorizing in linguistics, neurobiology and cognitive sciences on human language meaning within which two divergent approaches for the mathematical and cognitive aspects of linguistic meaning exist. The tensions can be somewhat neutralized if formal-mathematical structures and cognitive representations of natural language meaning can be shown to have representational duality and unity in brain dynamics. This work shows a broad outline of one, if not the only one, path toward this vision. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.