Humanities & Social Sciences IIT Madras

08/11/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/1CpcNSNpsJ/

04/04/2025

Call for Papers!

The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras is organizing a two-day national conference on:

"Tribal Resistance, Resilience, and Reimagining Futures: Celebrating 150 Years of Bhagwan Birsa Munda’s Legacy"

📅 Date: 21-22 June 2025
📍 Venue: IIT Madras Campus
📝 Abstract Submission Deadline: 27 April 2025

For more details, check the Call for Papers (CPF) and Conference website

Submission link:
https://lnkd.in/gWwPBXMh

Conference website:
https://lnkd.in/g-rfJ5kA

24/10/2024

24/10/2024

HSS Faculty Seminar
October 24, 2024
03: 30 PM || HSB 357

"BEYOND AESTHETIC PLEASURE:
Kãvya and the Process of Self-Fashioning"

By: Dr. Sreenath V S

18/10/2024

GUEST LECTURE:
Anindita Chakrabarti
Professor of Sociology
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur

Topic: "Many Lives of Gold in India: Commodity, Communities, and Economic Circuits"

October 22, 2024
11 AM
HSB 333

18/10/2024

The Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
IIT Madras, is organising a session on foreign
fellowship and research grant opportunities for PhD
scholars. Three of our PhD Scholars who have received
prestigious fellowships and grants, such as the
Fulbright Nehru fellowship, the Commonwealth
Fellowship, and the Inlaks Research Grant, share
experiences of their respective fellowships right from
the application process to travel, expenses, lodging,
and navigating research life abroad.

Friday, 18th October,
05 PM, HSB 334.

26/09/2024

PhD and M.S (by research) 2024-25 at IIT Madras

Are you ready to embark on a journey of cutting-edge research and innovation? The prestigious IIT Madras invites applications for its research programmes {Ph.D. and M.S. (by research)} for the academic year 2024-25 (Jan-May 2025)

Last date: 31st October 2024.

Click the link for more information:

24/09/2024

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences & Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS)IIT Madras invites you to a two-day International Seminar on "Linguistic Traditions and Structure of Negation in Modern Indian Languages."

Time: 9.00 am
Date: 30 September and 01 October 2024
Place: ICSR Hall-2

09/09/2024

Here we go again!
The Economics Discussion Forum (still sn*******ng into something bigger than itself) is ready with its second Session. We asked you what you would like to discuss in EDF Session #2, and there was majority sentiment leaning the way of one particular topic, so here it is!

Topic of Discussion:

"Unemployment in India with special emphasis on Harris and Todaro's urban-unemployment model"

Key Discussion Points:

○ The impact of automation on employment
○ Government policies and their effectiveness in the Indian informal sector
○ Relevance of the H-T model in contemporary India

13th September, 2024
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
HSB 355

As always, the EDF is open to students from all departments across IITM. Please confirm your attendance and let us know how you'd like to contribute using the Google Form linked below, or by scanning the QR code on the poster.

https://forms.gle/o2tpHCjgbwkodGb99

For any queries, please contact:
Arka : +91 94328 69470
Srijani : +91 85828 23629

28/08/2024

Symposium and Open Round Table on "Voice, Category and Copula"

Speaker: Prof. Marcel Den Dikken

Date: 16-17 September 2024

The grammatical category of Voice manifests itself in many different ways, typically in the form of an alternation between two diathesis patterns, i.e., active and passive. It has a strong connection with the category. For example, in English, the voice marking participle
-en is a mixed category showing both verbal (lunch is eaten at noon) and adjectival (the food remained uneaten) properties. Mixed categories raise various questions for morphosyntactic analysis, especially regarding the functional superstructure that defines them. Voice is an important player in this connection. Predication is central not just to Voice alternations but also to other relationships between two phrasal categories, including the relation between a predicate nominal and its subject (Mary is a nice person).
Predication relations frequently require an element of 'verbal glue' between the subject and the predicate - the copula (in the English example of the previous sentence). The syntactic distribution of the copula is cross-linguistically highly variable and has given rise to much discussion. Another aspect of the categorial status of the main predicate of a sentence is case alignment. Indian languages frequently show mixed alignment (nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive), oscillating between the two main patterns depending on the categorial status of the main predicate. The connection between case alignment and category is a topic of discussion in linguistics literature. The proposed symposium addresses various questions related to these three categories, i.e., voice, copula and ergativity from the perspective of Indian languages.

28/08/2024

The 'Outside' Substantiate Academics: Or how theory's situated material history can be foundationalized in music, art and craft

We explore our academic journey co-joined with a ‘slow’ story of music, art, and craft – usually treated as an ‘outside’ to academia. Over time, this is both metaphor and a lens through which we have come to think of agency and the city to be co-emergent via everyday materialities. Most often subtle, necessarily opaque, indeterminate spatially, these remain sensed as dream-like and seemingly fragmented. Such sensing is bypassed when both academics and their pedagogy seek and often rule to discipline, an explicit politics centered on ‘voice and protest’. Maybe this stems from and reflects academia’s own self obsession hidden behind high-ground canonical, disconnects and fear, aggression, where impostership spurs aggressive pedagogy around rote learning. Here, the rich terrain remains as an ‘outside’ posing the city analytic around categories such as: “..Unplanned, slums and encroachers, marginalized, under-developed tribals, patron clientalism, corruption, liminal’. When instead we take seriously such ‘outside’, we also argue that theory is deeply enriched, but also both method and pedagogy be kinder to accept and and recognise substantive academic value when discovered experientially via fieldwork by students and younger researchers. Is this ‘outside’ important for departments to take seriously? In other words, even as a theorisation, does a department, a vital seeding ground to broader academia, need an outside: a space where one can be a musician, an artist, a poet, a cook, an explorer or even a mafia don. And is there need to vision a department as a manifestation of this larger vision to support such outside?

Solomon Benjamin and Thanggoulen Kipgen will illustrate their long and slow journeys, evolved ways to think about city and agency shaping their academic sensibility. Please join us!