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 landscape orientation of smartphone offers a better aspect ratio and extensive view for watching media and photography. However, it presents challenges of occlusion, reachability, and frequent re-gripping in one-handed interactions. To address these issues we took the opportunity of deformation gestures to interact with future flexible smartphones. A preliminary survey was conducted to understand one-handed landscape mode usage patterns. Then, the 1st study was conducted to identify 3 most preferred one-handed landscape mode grips. In the 2nd study, we gathered unique user-defined deformation gestures to identify the set of most natural and intuitive gestures corresponding to each grip. We also found 3 gestures that can be performed in more than one grip. Finally, we discuss the influence of the grips on performing gestures. © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

World University root node

TEI 2019 - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction

Natural and intuitive deformation gestures for one-handed landscape mode interaction

Sukracharjya Rabha, a visionary theatre practitioner, established the Badungduppa Kalakendra in a remote village at Rampur and was also the director of the well-known “Under the Sal Tree” annual theatre festival. His theatre practice that was rooted materially, economically and ecologically at the heart of an indigenous community, creates a distinctly different political economy, which departs radically from previous attempts by the exponents of the “Theatre of Roots” movement to indigenise theatre in India and formulates a critique of it. © 2019 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

Economic and Political Weekly

Sukracharjya Rabha (1977–2018) Empowering community through theatre in Assam

The present research examines the strength of terror management theory in an indigenous Indian context of religious fair called Magh Mela. It explores how elderly Hindu people deal with death anxiety through practicing Kalpvas in Magh Mela. The research explores the role of social detachment and self-esteem in coping with terror of death. Study 1, a field experiment on 150 Kalpvasis (practitioners of Kalpvas) confirms the significant role of social detachment as an adaptive strategy for coping with death terror. The role of self-esteem did not emerge in the study. Study 2, another field experiment on 62 Kalpvasis confirms results of study 1. Significant role of years of Kalpvas on fear of death shows importance of the religious practices in managing terror related to death. The relation of terror management theory and death anxiety thus follows a different explanation for more indigenous contexts. © The Author(s) 2017.

Omega (United States)

Role of Social Detachment in Coping With Death Anxiety: A Case of Elderly Hindu Pilgrims

An American novelist of Chinese origin, Amy Tan attempts to reconstitute the American experience for both the first and second generation Chinese immigrants in her fictional discourses. Curiously, she defiantly promotes the idea of a re-created identity through assimilation, even while she is aware of the inability of Asian Americans to discard their ethnicity and disappear into the American culture. Significantly, Tan’s fictional Asian American characters not only justify their ethnic affiliation but also assert the importance of variance within the American culture by challenging the status-quo of American identity. However, this assertion of the Asian American subjectivity within the multicultural context of America further reinforces the insurmountable cultural differences between the scientific Western ‘self’ and the exotic Eastern ‘other,’ leading to the production of hybrid or alchemised characters, rather than monolithic Americans. Focusing on her use of exotic and supernatural tropes in The Hundred Secret Senses, this paper probes how Tan astutely perpetuates occidental and oriental stereotyping in her fictions and thereby indulges in New Age Ethnicity or neo-Orientalism, as a part of her aspiration to belong to the white American intellectual circle. © Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 2019.

Journal of Language, Literature and Culture

Neo-orientalist stereotyping in amy tan’s the hundred secret senses

This article analyses the homologies between colonial knowledge projects and post-colonial revival programmes through Indian textiles and dress. In the nineteenth century, the colonial bureaucracy treated Indian textiles as samples of ‘native’ artisanship, using them to police discourses of race, gender and citizenship. Concomitantly, the nationalist movement created a model of Indian womanhood that conscripted women to be both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, signified in the Nivi sari, linking this to emerging craft conservation movements. Post-Independence, elite women became the directors of craft revival by linking sartorial taste to ideal womanhood in a continuation of colonial discourse. © 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies

The orientalisation of the sari—sartorial praxis and womanhood in colonial and post-colonial India

Purpose: This study examines information processing during consumer decision making on online platforms as influenced by gender differences and psychological tendencies. Further exploration is ‘how much information is too much information; leading to infobesity.’ Methodology: The methodology to address the objective included the questionnaires for assessment of psychological tendencies and naturalistic experiments to measure decision making in online conditions. An online marketplace prototype was created for mobile purchase, named ‘mobile bazaar,’ and another for hotel booking, named ‘backpackers.’ The prototype was designed in such a way that the manipulation of information presented to the participant is possible. Participants were recruited with purposive and snowball sampling method depending upon their willingness and familiarity with online market platforms. Final data were collected from Three hundred sixty-eight participants during the period of October 2017-March 2018. The data from questionnaires and the computerized task was scored and analyzed with SPSS version 21 with t-test, chi-square and logistic regression analysis methods. Main findings: The present study shows the influence of psychological tendencies (i.e., need for closure, exploratory tendencies, and uncertainty avoidance) and gender difference in decision making. Female seems to follow ‘process less to process better’ strategy, whereas, men seem to follow ‘process more to get better’ strategy. The findings also provided input to the debate of information measurement in consumer research. Implications: Understanding decision making features of Indian consumers can not only contribute to the understanding of the naturalistic decision-making process itself but also can provide inputs to the market researchers, designers, and policymakers. Novelty /originality of the study: The study was novel in terms of its use of the online marketplace prototype as a naturalistic decision making study method. This method allowed the researchers to examine participants' behavior (of information processing and decision making) in real like scenarios and yet had the luxury of manipulation of presenting information as per research design. Therefore the findings of present study will have more generalizability. © Maidullah and Sharma.

Fulltext

Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews

Decision making in the era of infobesity: A study on interaction of gender and psychological tendencies

Outbound automated calls present an excellent opportunity to deliver messages among low-technology literate users from a resource-constrained environment, such as rural India. While automated calls have been used for various purposes in rural settings, sufficient research has not been done to understand the motivation for attending the calls, preferred contents, call duration, time, preferred gender of voice, content learnability and preference of automated call over SMS for information delivery. In this paper, we present a study conducted among 40 early-stage Tuberculosis (TB) positive patients to investigate content learnability and preferences of outbound automated calls aimed to increase DOTS adherence. The results indicate the demand for easily actionable contents, evenings as preferred time and less than 5 min as ideal call duration for automated calls. We found the preference of automated calls over SMS for information delivery. We also observed a significant increase in learnability among participants who listened to the complete call as compared to participants who did not. We present these findings in detail and suitable recommendations. © 2019, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

A Study of Outbound Automated Call Preferences for DOTS Adherence in Rural India

Feminist Media Studies

Mediating postcolonial pregnancies in neoliberal times

ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews

Subverting Patriarchy in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

Reading and drawing geometric shapes are challenging tasks for visually impaired and blind users. The development of a human-centered design solution to address these issues and simulate the techniques of tactile drawing requires a detailed understanding of the process. The objective of this study is to understand the method of reading compound shapes and drawing primitive shapes (triangle and rectangle) to help design digital drawing tool. We conducted a direct observational study of tactile reading and drawing tasks along with semi-structured interviews of 10 visually impaired and blind students. We analyzed the data through affinity analysis and identified a set of validation strategies for drawing and shape identification techniques for reading used by the participants for error prevention and recovery. We present the findings in detail and discuss them in this paper. We believe that the findings will help designers, developers, and researchers to design technology-based interventions for non-visual drawing. © 2019 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.