Department of History

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

Culture has a strong influence on how people evaluate and regulate their emotions. Previous findings suggest that Easterners tend to prefer controlling their emotions more than do Westerners. However, there is still little evidence on the prevalence of cultural differences in implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation. The goal of the present study is to investigate cross-cultural differences in the implicit and explicit attitudes towards emotion regulation to help bridge this gap in the literature. The sample consisted of 61 Chinese and 54 European Americans. Emotion Regulation Implicit Association Test (ER-IAT) was used to examine the implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation. Results showed that (1) Chinese implicitly evaluated emotional expression as more negative than European Americans; (2) Similarly, Chinese explicitly valued emotional expression as less important than European Americans. Further implications are discussed. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

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Other Publications

Personality and Individual Differences

Cultural differences in the implicit and explicit attitudes toward emotion regulation

Department of Creative Writing

The Critic as Amateur

The olfactory system provides us with rich information about the world, but the odours around us are not always detectable. Previous research has shown that disgust enhances olfactory sensitivity to n-butanol. Because n-butanol incidentally is mildly negative, it is unclear whether disgust, being a negative, avoidant emotion, enhances sensitivity to stimuli with negative qualities (valence-fit effect), or across stimuli in general (general sensitivity effect). Here we tested these competing hypotheses by examining thresholds to two scents, one positive (phenylethanol) and one mildly negative (n-butanol), during a disgust, happiness, and neutral emotion induction. We found that exposure to disgusting pictures lowered olfactory threshold across both scents. Thus our current results replicated the results of previous research, and also revealed support for a general sensitivity rather than a valence-fit effect. This suggests that disgust facilitates the perceptual detection of extremely faint targets presumably because avoidant emotions enhance perceptual vigilance in general. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &amp; Francis Group.

Cognition and Emotion

Disgust lowers olfactory threshold: a test of the underlying mechanism

This article focuses on the Tawang and West Kameng districts of Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India, collectively known as Monyul. It was ruled by Tibet for three centuries before the 1914 McMahon Line boundary included it in India. Even after that, cross-border exchanges between Monyul and Tibet continued until the 1962 Sino-Indian war, following which border passages between the two were closed. Today, Monyul is a marginal region, geographically distant from centres of industry and education, and lacking in terms of infrastructure. This article traces Monyul's marginality not simply to the border war, but to spatial practices of the British colonial state, beginning with the mapping of the boundary in 1914. It shows how Monyul was constructed as a buffer, despite being within a delimited boundary, first, by excluding it from regular administration, and, secondly, by pushing back the older Tibetan administration, thereby, making it (what I call) a ‘zone of difference/indifference’. But the buffer project was subject to contestation, mostly from the Tibetan religious aristocracy, whose temporal hold over, and material interests in, Monyul were challenged by the latter's incorporation into colonial India.

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Modern Asian Studies

Producing Monyul as Buffer: Spatial politics in a colonial frontier

In 2006, four successful entrepreneurs decided to establish a world-class mega university. Initially, the project progressed slowly until Vineet Gupta was able to locate a small plot of land in Sonipat, Haryana. Forty-eight hours before the payment deadline, Ashish Dhawan and Sanjeev Bikchandani agreed to invest in their personal capital to kick start the project. They however suggested a pivot in favour of a smaller private liberal arts college. Meanwhile, Pramath Sinha, with prior experience in establishing the Indian School of Business launched a pilot through the Young India Fellowship (YIF). Dhawan and Bikhchandani, through their extensive entrepreneurial networks, raised scholarships for the first two batches of the fellowship in the hope of attracting other donors to the board and getting a buy-in for Ashoka University. The team faced a number of challenges: managing the new model of collective philanthropy, recruiting faculty and finding jobs for the first undergraduate batch. At Ashoka University's first graduation ceremony in 2017 they wondered whether this model could revolutionise the higher education space like the IITs and IIMs had done for the country.

Department of Entrepreneurship

IIM Ahmedabad

Entrepreneurship and the Liberal Arts: The Making of Ashoka University

The 1981 Dalit mass conversion to Islam at Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu, arguably began the Hindu Right's political rise. The conversion raises two different concepts for understanding mass conversion's relationship to democracy. Though it is commonly framed in terms of B. R. Ambedkar's thought, whereby conversion's core is an interior psychic process of changing principles to see the world differently, I suggest that Meenakshipuram's event may more appropriately be framed by E. V. Ramasami's [EVR] thought, whereby conversion's core is an exterior somatic process of changing appearances to be seen differently in the world. These concepts of conversion raise alternative engagements with issues of text, force, foreignness, time, and Marxism. The argument is prefaced by a discussion of freedom's typology (Berlin), subaltern representation (Spivak), and religious mass (Geertz/Asad), which I argue favors EVR's concept of conversion over Ambedkar's. Such issues are not unimportant in an age of rising right-wing populisms globally.

Department of Political Science

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Two Concepts of Conversion at Meenakshipuram: Seeing through Ambedkar's Buddhism and Being Seen in EVR's Islam

The parliament, media, and citizens, are key stakeholders in any democracy. We study their priorities pertaining to four economic policies in India - Demonetization, Aadhaar, GST, and Farmers' Protests - by examining the content of questions asked by politicians in the parliament, news articles published in the mass media, and data from social media. We find that the mass media covers stories about different constituencies (the poor, middle-class, corporates, etc.) but shows biases in terms of which constituencies it chooses to focus on for each policy. The parliament tends to focus on procedural aspects of the policies. We also find that the social media simply echoes the trends of whatever is emphasized more in the mass media, without much deviation in the attention placed by social media users on different issues. We further find out that instead of selecting issues of importance based on feedback from citizens, the parliamentarians mostly indulge in partisanship, and shape their questions based on party goals that change depending on whether their party is in power or not. Overall, we are able to use this analysis to comment on how representative and responsive the Indian democracy is to its citizens.

COMPASS 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies

Studying the discourse on economic policies in India using mass media, social media, and the parliamentary question hour data

Centenaries, bi-centenaries, and similar milestones are occasions to reflect upon people, events, institutions. 2015 was the year that brought together two major authors born in the same year, one hundred and fifty years ago – W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling – both with connections with India, although in two entirely different ways. Reading milestones is a temptation to dwell on the moment, on uniqueness and on individual achievement. What I wish to do here instead is to open up the perspective. Milestones are part of a process and that process is a journey. I would like to suggest that the very notion of a journey is central to the ways in which Yeats and Kipling wrote their finest poetry. Their individual modes of interweaving this concept into their poetry are an index to both their similarities and their differences.

Department of English

Yeats, Kipling, and the haven-finding art

The next step after smart cities is the creation of digital or smart nations. A digital nation requires a national transformation across diverse institutions including the urban and rural areas of a society. Besides diverse social innovation initiatives, sustainability is a key aspect, so that rather than greenfield projects, long-term solutions will involve brownfield, smart city projects. A digital transformation to a digital or smart nation requires a great deal of innovation in planning, process re-engineering and execution. Whereas research work and policy actions are traditionally focused on a city level, these efforts need to be widened to the national level. Existing city-scale theories and frameworks may be used and adapted to meet the larger-scale needs of the future smart nations. The new issues and research challenges which arise need to be addressed through interdisciplinary approaches. This special issue on the theme of digital nations attempts to address the need in the academic literature to provide a better understanding of digital nations.