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ABSTRACT: Time perception and timing are typically understood and studied independently. I will discuss a proposal to integrate time perception and timing to understand temporal aspects of consciousness. This proposal postulates a hierarchy in which time is handled differently at different levels. In line with this, we have performed a study to understand the effect of a single perceptual change on perceived time. I will present the results from this study done using Necker cube, I will also discuss how different factors like intentions, attention, and social context influence our perception of time.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Narayanan Srinivasan is currently Professor and Head at the Department of Cognitive Science, IIT Kanpur. He worked at the Centre of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, University of Allahabad for 17 years. He studies mental processes, especially consciousness, attention, emotions, and decision making using multiple methodologies. Dr. Srinivasan is a fellow of Association for Psychological Science, National Academy of Psychology (India), and Psychonomic Society.

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ABSTRACT: This talk begins by noting an unusual twinning that has occurred in the last decade or so within the social semantics of global space. The words ‘narrative’ and ‘toolkit’ have both firmly established their presence in public consciousness over the past few years. Why is this so? My talk suggests that there may in fact be hidden connections between the two apparently unrelated concepts of technology (emblematized by the ‘toolkit’) and language (displayed in one of its most powerful and flamboyant aspects as ‘narrative’ rather than simply as story). By way of sharpening a couple of conceptual differences between ‘story’ and ‘narrative’, I argue for certain fundamental linkages between tool-use and language-use that date back to prehistory and the way our mind/brains have evolved to conceptually process, thematically organise and emotionally absorb the world around us. These whispers from our ‘deep history’ could help explain our present addiction both to technology and to ‘post-truth’ narratives. In this sense, the talk returns us to a basic cognitive conundrum. Narratives are not, prima facie, the most efficient ways of transmitting information. Indeed, they often flaunt their fictive ‘lying’ nature. Yet narratives are discourse universals found in every known culture; they are persistently displayed in material art forms extending from Madhubani paintings to Louis Malle films to Internet memes. Again, why is this so? I postulate in this talk that the ‘toolbox’ of language in the early 21st century now contains a sophisticated range of tools (including syntactic embedding and repetition, auditory rhyming, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, irony and sarcasm etc. all the way up to pragmatic units of conversation such as speech acts) that are, for the most part, narratively embedded. These language devices have all been dizzyingly amplified by the technological revolution of which we are currently in the midst. In short, narrative, an ancient species-tool for cooperative communication and displays of efficacious causal reasoning has evolved into a powerful

interdisciplinary tool for virtually every sort of contemporary inquiry into ‘what makes us human’ from anthropology to zoology.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:  Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English, Emerita, at IIT Delhi. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and has since taught at universities ranging from Singapore to Stanford. Awarded another honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp for her contributions to narrative theory, Nair has authored 10 books and more than 150 articles. Her academic books include Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference; Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture; Poetry in a Time of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2002, 2003, 2009) and Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic Classroom (Harper Collins, 1997). Her most recent book is the reference volume (co-edited with Peter de Souza) entitled Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, UK, 2020). Nair was Head of Department, Humanities and Social Sciences, IITD, from 2006 to 2009, CRASSH Fellow at Cambridge, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library 2010-12, followed by a Professorial Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in 2016. In 2019, she was Distinguished Visiting Professor, Hunan University. Currently on the Fellowships Committee of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Nair serves on the boards of international journals such as Language and Dialogue, Literary Semantics, Text Matters as well as on the Consultative Boards of the International Pragmatics Association (IPRA) and Biblio.

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ABSTRACT: A large literature has documented violations of expected utility consistent with a preference for certainty (the “certainty effect”). We design a laboratory experiment to investigate the role of the certainty effect in explaining violations of the independence axiom. We use lotteries spanning over the entire probability simplex to detect violations systematically. We find that violations of independence consistent with the reverse certainty effect are much more common than violations consistent with the certainty effect. Results hold as we test robustness along two dimensions: varying the mixing lottery and moving slightly away from certainty.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Ritesh Jain is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He completed his PhD from the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University in 2018. His research interests are in the field of microeconomic theory and experimental economics. He has published his research in international journals such as Games and Economic Behavior and Journal of Mathematical Economics. In addition to working on mechanism design in the classical setup, his research is inspired by recent applications of epistemic game theory to economic theory. He also designs experiments to test economics theories, such as repeated games and expected utility theory, in the lab.

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ABSTRACT: Empirical evidence has affirmed that memory is an essential attribute of human cognition. Memory helps an individual in the storage and recollection of the relevant information. It was believed that memory is an accurate depiction of past scenarios; they are fixed entities like digital harddrive. Several studies have shown that the initial trace of memory is malleable, and with time, it gets robust and solidified. Once incoming information is encoded and stored, they are resistant to change or modification. Nevertheless, targeting the memory process after initial learning or upon reactivation is susceptible to modifications. Furthermore, memory is susceptible to modification because it needs maintenance and updating from time to time. In recent years, researchers have developed an interest in the alteration of memory. Updation of memory might help us in the development of therapeutic procedures towards pathological memories. Several paradigms have been used to date in memory modifications such as memory reconsolidation, pharmacological, neurostimulation, etc. In this talk, we will share the novel drug-free methodologies (i.e., memory reconsolidation and neurostimulation) in the treatment of pathological memories. In detail, memory reconsolidation mechanism, a process in which memory upon reactivation with a single cue becomes labile and malleable in nature. Moreover, in this talk, we will learn about the malleable nature of the reactivated memory and boundary conditions of memory reconsolidation. It is noteworthy here that not all memories undergo reconsolidation upon reactivation. Here, we will discuss the boundary conditions of memory.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Manish Kumar Asthana is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. Before joining IIT-Roorkee in 2019, Dr. Asthana was an associate professor at the Department of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China. He obtained his doctoral degree in 2013 at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany and post-doctoralship in social cognitive neuroscience at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University (Brazil) and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (India). His line of research has aimed to study pathological learning and memory mechanisms. The investigation of such processes has a highly significant biological impact. These processes represent a basic mechanism in an individual's adaptation to environmental changes and, consequently, the organism's homeostatic balance. He has conducted research mainly in the area of associative fear learning and its modulation. The development and introduction of novel methods such as behavioral, transcranial direct current stimulation, and genetics were the particular focus of his work. Other exciting research fields were investigations of early biomarkers for anxiety and related disorders, e.g., startle, skin conductance response (SCR), heart-rate variability, blood pressure, etc., for the assessment of early detection of anxiety or related disorders.

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ABSTRACT: Since the Prague School linguists set out to define the distinctive features to describe speech sounds, phonological theory has been a rule-based system of mapping the input to the output through a series of rules. Optimality Theory proposed by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1993 was a radical shift away from this step-by-step mechanism. Merging together the concepts of harmonic grammar with the theoretical insight that phonological changes reduce markedness, their constraint- based evaluative mechanism, has four salient points:

1. The two kinds of universal constraints; markedness and faithfulness.

2. Constraint interactivity is through mutual ranking.

3. The generative mechanism, GEN, produces unrestricted output candidates.

4. The evaluative mechanism, EVAL, delivers the form that matches the actual surface representation as the optimal output in one step by evaluating it in parallel with all other potential outputs. 

In this talk, I will describe some of the challenges and recent progress associated with the second and third points. While doing so I will touch upon two of my recent theoretical works using Malayalam and Punjabi to discuss a) the difference between using weighted constraints and ranked constraints, and b) the difference between unrestricted GEN and harmonically bound GEN.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Paroma Sanyal is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. After completing her M.A in English she earned her M.Phil and PhD in Linguistics, from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her research interests are in theoretical approaches to phonology and morpho-syntax. Specifically, she uses the theoretical frameworks of Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar to analyze phonological data and Distributive Morphology and Minimalism for the analysis of morpho-syntactic aspects which are realized though phonological processes in particular natural languages. Though her research has been exclusively within the domain of linguistics, she started her teaching career as an English faculty at the University of Hyderabad and then the Central University of Karnataka. She was also instrumental in setting up the Language Learning Centre at IIT Delhi that assists students from non-English medium background transition into an English-dominant academic culture.

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Abstract Action on global warming (climate change) is an exercise in cost-benefit analysis (CBA) where the costs of reducing heat trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) reflect in the present but the benefits will appear in future. This talk will present a tool for CBA of climate policies, namely, integrated assessment models (IAMs). In particular it will analyse the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy (DICE) model for which William Nordhaus received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics. The lecture will apply DICE to answer policy questions such as how GHGs should be reduced and at what rate. About the speaker: Shreekant Gupta is Professor, Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and Adjunct Professor, LKY School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He has worked extensively on the economics of climate change and is co-author of several reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He also serves as Vice-President, Indian Society for Ecological Economics.

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Abstract British colonialism in India has produced several official reports and statistical data on the colonized. While there are governmental enumerative rationalities and colonial knowledge dimensions to the whole project of archival documentation in British India, critical reflections highlighted the beginning of new political languages, modalities, categorization, subjectivities and othering in the colony (Foucault:1969; Cohn: 1996). This presentation engages with colonial medical archives in India particularly the Lunatic Asylum reports in British South India to understand the construction of new identities. This research focuses on the cases of ‘Lunatic’ and the ‘Criminal Lunatic’ in the asylum reports to point out how the colonial state in India used similar Victorian perceptions to identify and categorize Indian ‘criminal lunatics’. About the speaker: Dr. Santhosh Abraham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. His research interests include History of Science and Medicine, Psychiatry and Mental Asylums, Sociology of Law, Legal History, Muslims and Islamic Law, Education, Social Mobility, and Informal Legal Systems. Dr. Abraham is also serving as the Editorial Board Member of South Asia Research: An International multidisciplinary journal. He was the recipient of the Medical Humanities Research Award by Wellcome Trust, London in 2014 and 2015. In the recent years, his research focuses on the creation of identities under the British rule in India.

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Abstract In the 1990s, the post-world war II consensus on science and the state began to be disintegrated not just in the developed world but most parts of the developing world drawn into the frame of science and development during the decades of decolonization. This disintegration was itself a product of the coevolution of state and science, as well as the mutual transformations engendered by this parallel evolution. These transformations have been studied, analysed and investigated by sociologists of science in the West, who have identified for us; (a) the transformations in the world of knowledge production and the move from so-called mode 1 to mode 2 knowledge production, and (b) the changes in the ethos of science from Merton’s CUDOS to Ziman’s PLACE which then marks the emergence of so- called post-academic science. The intent of this lecture is to engage with the different dimensions of such phenomenon, and to reflexively turn upon and examine the realms of changing relationship between science, state and society. It is then suggested that the contributors take up concepts, theories and frameworks that shape contemporary discussion on the science, state and society relationship in India and establish how the contexts of the elaborations of these concepts and frames have changed – approaching very specific manifestations in their respective domains of investigation. In other words, the seminar is expected (a) to chronicle the transformations of the relationship between science and society in a variety of spheres, and (b) at the same time engage and situate the changing conceptual and theoretical developments that enable us to frame this relationship. This lecture highlights how science in the capitalist world has entered into a state of crisis, due primarily to the subjugation of scientific research to the capitalist monopolies and to military purposes, and the conflict between new discoveries and old idealist and metaphysical ideas. As the general crisis of capitalism has developed and become more acute, so has the confusion in scientific theory and distortion of scientific practices developed and increased with it. In this context, it is important to deploy science as a weapon for its self-introspection and advancement, as a social and philosophical investigation. The more scientific research has expanded and the greater these requirements has become, the more it has fallen under the control of the monopolies and their governments, and particularly the military. Science is expected to contribute to profits and wars, and to answer just those particular problems in which the capitalist monopolies are interested, which is by no means the same as answering the problems bound up with the further development of science and with the interests of the people. Thus science becomes more commercialized, militarized, disorganized and distorted. About the speaker: Dr. Sambit Mallick is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Dr. Mallick obtained his PhD, M.Phil and MA Degrees from the Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad. His research interests include Sociology of Science and Technology; Historical Sociology, Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation and Philosophy of the Social Sciences. His recent works cover Rice Biotechnology Research in India, Politics of Genetically Modified Crops and Intellectual Property Rights in relation to Plant Molecular Biology in India.

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Abstract In the contemporary global order of nation-states, how can we think about modes of belonging that do not conform to conventional political geographies and identities? Zomia, a concept given by Willem Van Schendel and popularized by James Scott was an attempt to describe spatial identity in a non-contiguous territorial frame, for Zomia covered dispersed hill-dwelling minorities in several Southeast Asian states. I use the notion of imagined geography both in a parallel and contrasting sense to the idea of Zomia – to understand new forms of cultural identity in the Himalayan region. Based on ethnographic work in the Monyul border of Western Arunachal Pradesh. I show how in certain discursive practices in this Tibetan Buddhist cultural region, the Himalayas are reconfigured to indicate not simply physical geography, but also imagined geography. This imagined space of belonging materializes through particular visions of Monyul as a Tibetan space, supported by collective programmes for upholding Tibetan Buddhist traditions in the region. These new circuits of belonging that I call Himalayan imagined geography draws into its fold not only Monpas living in Monyul, but also Buddhist people from surrounding Himalayan regions, such as Sikkim, Bhutan, and Nepal. Although arising in and manifesting through a political demand for local Mon autonomy, the Himalayan imagined geography does not have only Monyul as its single territorial referent but covers politically discontinuous units spread across the entire Himalayas. I show how reimagining the Himalayan geography in this manner enables us to reflect on the contours of post-national geographies (Appadurai 1996) that may not have a territorial character. About the speaker: Swargajyoti Gohain is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Emory University, the U.S.A., and a Bachelors and Masters in Sociology from Delhi University. She has held postdoctoral positions in the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, and the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Before joining Ashoka University, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Her Ph.D. dissertation, titled 'Imagined Places: Politics and Narratives in a Disputed Indo-Tibetan Borderland (2013), concerning cultural politics among the Tibetan Buddhist Monpa communities of Arunachal Pradesh', will soon be published by the University of Washington Press. She has published several articles on the politics of language, development, state formation, and identity politics among Tibetan Buddhist communities in Arunachal Pradesh. She has been the recipient of Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, DAAD, and Charles Wallace India Trust award.

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Abstract We are in the 21st century of studying brain, behaviour and language. That is, we are past the 19th century (Paul Broca’s discovery of left hemisphere), the 20th century use of use of computer-based techniques (e.g., Event Related Potentials or ERPs, and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI), and now in the 21st century, have greatly increased our understanding of brain and language. Or have we? I argue that a key component missing from this research is a proper theoretical underpinning regarding context vs. grammar, or heuristic vs. algorithm. Because these issues are not clearly defined in the linguistic study of brain and language, interpreting the neural correlates of linguistic behaviour remains unclear. I will present research from my lab, regarding modal subordination, that distinguishes conceptual semantics (i.e., context) vs. compositional semantics (i.e., grammar). Furthermore, I will present my sentence processing model of ‘Heuristic first, algorithmic second’ and connect those findings with ERP language studies in my lab and elsewhere. In addition, I will discuss implications of this and related work for Indian languages, especially regarding Hindi. Finally, given that these issues exist in well-studied European languages, what is a researcher in India to do? I argue that Indians have an advantage, due to Panini’s legacy, starting before the 1st century. Panini was the first grammarian to discuss algorithms. This strong foundation regarding the nature of generative grammar can inform the discipline of cognitive neuroscience of language, in which the nature of grammar and context are largely conflated. About the speaker: Veena D. Dwivedi is an associate professor in Psychology/Neuroscience, and Director of the Dwivedi Brain and Language Lab, at Brock University, Canada. After her BSc in Physiology/Immunology from McGill University, she completed a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1994) examining syntactic and semantic dependencies in Hindi relative phrases. She has pioneered the development of experimental studies using formal semantic theory, starting with behavioral work in 1992, then with Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) starting in 2005. Her current research focus is on the cognitive neuroscience of sentence processing, using ERPs.

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Abstract National language policy which is implemented from the top is perceived as official legislation designed to influence people’s linguistic lives. Recent research in language policy and planning (hence, LPP) underscore how top-down policy-makers, perceived as stakeholders of language ‘governance’ (Foucault 1978), endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalise minority languages and thus, perpetuate systems of socio-lingual inequality (Nandi 2018). Until relatively recently, LPP research has centred mostly on state-run language policy formulation and planning programmes with some exceptions (see Tollefson 1991; Shohamy 2006). However, the role of the actors within this discourse, such as parents, students, classroom teachers and other members of civil society, for whom the LPP is designed and their role in the interpretation and implementation of LPP has tended to receive diminished attention from researchers and policy makers. Rather than contrasting divides between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ policies, there has in mo re recent years been an attempt to analyse how discourses circulate across and within the language policy cycle. As Johnson (2018) notes, there is now a growing interest in how social actors position themselves vis-à- vis such discourses as a means of opening up ideological spaces for the use or non-use of certain languages or linguistic varieties. This has shifted the focus in language policy research away from a macro-analysis of national policies to an understanding how such policies are interpreted, implemented and negotiated by social actors on the ground. While elaborating on effective research methods to investigate language policies, Hornberger (2015) rejects the top-down approach for policy evaluation, postulating that it does not offer a fuller description of LPP processes across macro, institutional (i.e. school, community, family) and interpersonal layers– layers which they describe as a metaphorical onion. Whereas the outer layers of the ‘onion’ refer to macro level policy processes, the interior layers represent policy accommodations and negotiations that take place on the ground. Therefore, the gap in the literature on language policy interpretation and implementation can better be explained by slicing the onion ethnographically. Drawing on ethnographic research from different geopolitical contexts including Spain and the UK, this lecture intends to address mainly the role of human agency at various levels of policy formulation and enactment. About the speaker: Dr. Anik Nandi is a sociolinguist with expertise in language policy and planning. He received his PhD in Sociolinguistics from the School of Social Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. Prior to this, he earned his M.Phil from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His research interests primarily consist of sociolinguistics, ethnography, critical discourse analysis and, languages spoken in India and Spain. Currently, he is working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ‘Foreign, indigenous and community languages in the devolved regions of the UK: policy and practice for growth’ at Queen’s University Belfast. Before this, he worked at he the United Kingdom Higher Education Academy as an Associate Fellow.

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Abstract A My paper concerns itself with the transnationality/globality of the conceptual/imagined category known as the New Wave, prevalent as it was in the 1970s. For my doctoral research I investigated into some of the transnational associations between the Indian New Wave of the 1970s and its various Euro-Latino counterparts. These associations included the Bressonian connections of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani and the ideological encounters of Mrinal Sen and John Abraham with third cinema and a number of Latin American auteurs including the Argentine Fernando Solanas. I argued in favour of a transnational approach as opposed to the obsessive nation-state centred methodology of Indian cinema studies. Further investigations reveal the appearance of the transnational as a relatively recent phenomenon in cinema studies, even though the tracing of its roots and routes has proved itself to be an immensely complex, if not futile affair. The transnational can be located back in the prolonged 1960s and ‘70s, in May 1968 and after, what Immanuel Wallerstein addressed as the moment of revolution in the global modernity. An exploration of the transnational in the long ‘60s/‘70s engages with several problematics that include the debates on Marxism, the (un)decidability of the time-frame, concepts such as chemical exile/drug abuse in France and desaparecidos/forced disappearances in Latin America, and an undercurrent of politico-cultural and intercontinental tension between the North and the Global South. My current work on these debates and conceptual complexities and an extensive archival research at NFAI, Pune and ENERC, Buenos Aires, shape and inform this working paper as I strive for a strategy for the reading of the transnational within the Indian arthouse and the world (cinema) system of the time, as such a strategy will eventually form the crux of my book proposal. Brief Bio-sketch of the speaker About the speaker: Parichay Patra is an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Goa, India. He received his PhD degree from the Department of Film & Screen Studies at Monash University. Dr. Patra co-edited Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations (Routledge, 2016) and Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He is co-editing a collection of essays on Lav Diaz and working on his first monograph on cine-cultural transnationalisms in "May ’68 and after" with a special focus on the Indian New wave, for which he has recently worked as a visiting scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Abstract “Precarity is everywhere,” Pierre Bourdieu announced two decades ago. His declaration triggered an academic discourse that has spread across disciplines and nations. This talk builds on the social scientific research to explore visual representations of poverty that attracted a mass audience. No longer invisible, visual and literary representations of class and precarity are accruing significant media attention. Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Hollywood film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) for example presents the underclass in a sentimental mode. It's narrative frame foregrounds the universal tale of love endowing the dispossessed with humanity and wit. Whereas Slumdog Millionaire sugarcoats the horrendous conditions global capitalism imposes on today’s precariat, Hunger Games provokes memories of past horrors in order to draw attention to precarity. This film analysis aims to contribute to the emergent academic field that explores the socio-economic and psychological effects neoliberal governance exerts on the precarious class. The talk introduces Precarity Studies’ theoretical framework, which builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s foundational study La Misère du Monde (1993) and Judith Butler’s meditation on Levinasian ethics Precarious Life (2004), but has grown into a transdisciplinary field. Amongst other disciplines, it incorporates the Political Sciences (Isabelle Lorey, 2015), Postcolonial and Cultural Studies (Simon During, 2015). My talk brings this critical discourse to bear on Visual Studies, offering insights into the politics of representation that shape how precarity is constructed so that we have come to take mass exploitation for granted. About the speaker: Sieglinde Lemke is a senior professor of Cultural Studies at the English Department of the Albert- Ludwigs-University Freiburg. She is the author of Poverty, Inequality, and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture (Palgrave McMillan, 2017) (review ALH), Vernacular Matters in American Literature (Palgrave, 2009) and Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford UP, 1998). She is also the co-editor of the volume Class Divisions in Serial Television (Palgrave, 2017). Prof. Lemke had studied at the University of Konstanz, Germany and at UC Berkeley, taught at the Free University in Berlin and at Harvard University.