School of Liberal Arts (SoLA)

&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

The present study explores loneliness among female students who stayed at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. Recent research has shown a sharp rise in the self-reported incidences of loneliness, especially among females during the lockdown imposed in most regions around the globe. The studies have also shown that those with lower self-control and a negative self-image are more vulnerable to negative emotional and behavioral outcomes. Therefore, it would be interesting to see how are these aspects related to loneliness among young females that too in a patriarchal society such as India. Whether family dynamics have any impact on mitigating loneliness or not has also been investigated. For this purpose, an online survey was conducted on 1023 female students of various universities/colleges across India. The results show that loneliness is found less among the females who showed better self-control, positive self-image, and good family relationship. Though household work engagement can keep females busy, it has little to do with their feeling of loneliness. The study indicates that living with family members is not enough to deal with loneliness. Rather it requires a good relationship with family members, self-control, and a positive self-image. Hence, to deal with the loneliness issues that youth are facing at present, family connectedness and constructive self-view need to be (re)established to prevent loneliness from causing severe mental problems. © The Author(s) 2022.

World University root node

Family Journal

Lonely at Home: Exploring Factors Associated with Loneliness Among Female Students at Home During COVID-19 Lockdown in India

An introduction to a book is meant to introduce it to its potential readers, that is, to chart out the role it intends to perform. Any worldly-wise person would advise that it is always convenient to perform roles that society chooses for us. For attempts to transgress hese roles often trigger society's 'discipline and punish' mechanisms. © 2023 Rajdeep Konar and Social Science Press. All rights reserved.

To Stage or Not to Stage Tagore: Performing Tagore's Plays

To stage or not to stage tagore: Performing tagore's plays

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

Divisive Politics of the Inner Line Permit in Three Stories from Manipur in India’s Northeast

Malayalam cinema offers a unique body of work for scholars seeking to understand the heterogenous traditions of Indian engagement with Shakespeare. In this article, after a brief overview of the history of Malayalam reception of Shakespeare generally, I focus on the film adaptations of director Jayaraj (Kaliyāttam / Othello [1997]; Kannaki / Antony and Cleopatra [2002]; and Veeram / Hamlet [2017]). Of particular relevance is Jayaraj’s interest in Shakespeare’s female characters, whom he reshapes by immersing his adaptation in the local practices and idioms of Kerala culture, thus transforming the Shakespearean play-text thoroughly. The article examines the influence especially of kathāprasangam upon Jayaraj to understand what aspects of Shakespeare endure in Jayaraj’s films and what are transformed. By approaching the question of adaptation from the perspective of the emic and the etic, an apparatus made influential by linguist-anthropologist Kenneth Pike in his analysis of a cultural text, I examine why, in Malayalam, cinematic Shakespeares have seen greater commercial and critical success than Shakespeare in translation or literary adaptation. The article seeks to understand this disparity by closely reading some of the recurrent patterns that emerge in Shakespeare transculturated in the two domains of Malayalam literature (including translation) and film.

Indian Theatre Journal

Transculturated Shakespeare: Malayalam cinema and new adaptive modes

In their theory of class formation and social revolution, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were scathing about the lumpenproletariat, condemning it as anti-revolutionary, morally bankrupt, and a bribable tool of the bourgeoisie, a view that remained influential well into the mid-twentieth century. Not until Frantz Fanon appropriated the term lumpenproletariat in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and applied it to what he saw as a whole class of people waiting to be brought into and redeployed as the vanguard of a new revolutionary proletarian consciousness did it shed its negative connotations. The changed trajectories of the proper place and role of the lumpenproletariat can be seen in working-class literatures of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which constitute an important stage upon which to refine Marxian and Fanonian understandings of the lumpenproletariat. This essay examines three novels written in the last thirty years: Herbert, by Nabarun Bhattacharya, written originally in Bengali and published in 1993; How Late It Was, How Late, by Scottish writer James Kelman (1994); and Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra (2006). Read contrapuntally, these works provide a literary platform for the exploration of the representational shift in the role and function of the lumpenproletariat in the twenty-first century.

Asian Review of World Histories

The Lumpenproletariat and the Itinerary of a Concept: Some Literary Reflections

This paper presents a user study investigating the effect of directional cues and ease of performing deformation gestures on gesture action mappings. We selected four gestures of one-handed landscape mode interaction and twelve actions associated with different spatial directions for the mapping task. We evaluated thirty participants' preferences and appropriateness scores for mappings and ease of performing the gestures. We found that the Top-right-corner Bend-upward gesture is the easiest to perform and it constitutes the significantly most appropriate gesture action mappings that are majority preferred. We also found that directional cue, size of deformation, and the required effort in performing the gesture play important roles in user-preferred and appropriate mapping along with ease of performing the gestures. We also noticed that bend gestures at the corners and sides allow users to perceive multiple distinct directional cues, and they are suitable for mapping with multiple actions associated with different spatial directions. © 2021 ACM.

ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Gesture Action Mapping for Deformation-based One-handed Landscape Mode Interaction with Flexible Smartphone-sized Devices

This work presents an interview-based retrospective study conducted with students and teachers with blindness and low vision regarding mathematical diagrams. It aims to understand the experience of students and teachers in learning and creating mathematical diagrams and the need and scope of improvement through technological interventions in the Indian context. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ten students and four teachers with blindness or low vision and analyzed the collected data using thematic analysis. We found that students have little interest in learning and practicing mathematical diagrams on analog tools due to these tools' limited features. In addition, time-consuming mathematical drawings as a part of the academic assessment process and less awareness of their future use contribute to this reduced interest. We believe using a collaborative learning process through digital tools with tactile feedback can facilitate easy and quick understanding with a more competitive and enjoyable environment to learn mathematical diagrams. © 2021 ACM.

Learning and Creating Mathematical Diagrams: Findings of a Retrospective Study Conducted with Users with Blindness or Low Vision

Technology is increasingly essential in engaging millennials. Over the past few decades, education pedagogy has struggled to develop new methods and tools to create better and higher quality education. Virtual reality (VR) technology is one of the solutions for new education pedagogy that can solve the restriction of space, time, and the act of learning. The VR inclusion into learning pedagogy also facilitates self-learning and problem-solving as well as assist students to explore new ideas. This study aims to develop and trial lessons of art and design using VR technology instead of traditional art and design classes. The participants are 6th standard school students. Within traditional teaching of art and design, depth of learning is insufficient. To challenge the traditional environment, VR technology-based art and design lesson are applied in the core curricula of art education in this study. Two sets of tests are conducted with 6th graders, one is pre- and post-test with VR-based lesson, and the other is pre- and post-test with non-VR-based lessons. Overall, this study hypothesizes that VR will make for better learning and upskilling of students’ knowledge of art and design. This study found that the teaching outcome with VR and conventional teaching outcomes has a number of significant differences. Besides, it shows the pathway of VR-based teaching methodology in classroom environment. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies

Enhancing Creative Learning Methods by Immersive Virtual Reality: A Pilot Study in Classroom Environment

Previous research has demonstrated a strong relationship between access to capital and academic achievement. The present study explores the mediating role of the individual mindset and class perception in the capital–achievement relation. A survey-based study is conducted on 314 Delhi based undergraduate students. Different measures/proxies of various forms of capital and achievement are used. To see the role of the individual mindset, psychological resources of individual are considered and operationalized in terms of self-motivation and self-confidence. Results show that economic, social, and cultural capital have a significant influence on academic achievement. However, class perception and involvement in highbrow activities do not show any role in academic achievement. Results further reveal a significant mediating role of psychological resources in the capital–achievement relation. Results demonstrate that in the Indian higher education system, various forms of capital largely shape academic achievement and psychological resources significantly facilitate this relationship. Though the individual mindset can help in breaking this capital–achievement nexus, mostly it seems to be facilitating the relation. The results and implications of the study are discussed. © The Author(s) 2021.

Research in Education

Capital access and its mobilization for academic achievement: A case of Indian higher education system

Classification of body gestures is vital in HCI research as it benefits researchers with appropriate gestures considering user behavior, mental model, and constraints. This work presents the gesture classification of 87 unique gestures identified through an elicitation study for object selection in Virtual Reality (VR). In addition to adopting existing gesture taxonomies, we propose two new taxonomies based on hand dominance- (i) dominant hand only (ii) non-dominant hand first and (iii) equal and simultaneous hand dominance and multi-body part movement gestures - (i) simultaneous and (ii) sequential. We believe that the proposed classification and taxonomies will assist designers and researchers in designing effective full-body gestural interfaces, including VR interfaces. © 2021 ACM.