Disjunctive Temporalities, Discrepant Futures: An Ethnography of Call Centers in Bangalore

Disjunctive Temporalities, Discrepant Futures: An Ethnography of Call Centers in Bangalore
Date
Fri May 4th 2018, 3:00 - 4:30pm
Event Sponsor
Center for South Asia
Location
Okimoto Room, Encina Hall
Speaker: Akhil Gupta - Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for India and South Asia at UCLA, Purnima Mankekar - Professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and Asian-American Studies and Film Television and Digital Media at UCLA

Free and open to the public.

About the talk:

Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. We have conducted an anthropological study of call center workers in the outsourcing hub of Bengaluru. These young workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with consumers in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and elsewhere. Our work focuses on the affective dimensions of labor in the BPO industry, asking: How does the experience of work produce particular understandings of time, embodiment, and sociality? The research explores the complex interplay between work, personal aspirations, social futures, and transformations in global capitalism. This industry has had contradictory effects that lead both to upward mobility but also to precarity.

Challenging superficial accounts of predatory corporations in the Global North using “coolie labor” in the Global South to enhance profits through off-shoring and outsourcing, we draw on long-term fieldwork to argue that such simplistic narratives fail to capture the complexity and density of interactions between imagination, aspiration, technology, and work for upwardly-mobile classes in the Global South. New technologies such as artificial intelligence, chat, and the digitization of work constantly transform the experiences of workers in this industry. Their experiences provide us with critical insights into capital, labor, and information technology in our rapidly changing world.

About the speakers:

Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. Gupta is a sociocultural anthropologist currently working on questions of transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption. He has been doing research on call centers in India since 2009. He is interested in the themes of contemporary capitalism, development, postcoloniality, globalization, and the state. His empirical research interrogates anthropological and social theory from its margins by paying attention to the experience of peasants and other groups of poor people in India.

Purnima Mankekar is an anthropologist of media. She is the Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs and Professor, Gender Studies, Asian American Studies and Film , Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, and holds a concurrent faculty appointment in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.  In addition to her research on call centers, she also works on affective publics, digital media, and the racialization of Muslim and Sikh Americans in the ongoing "war on terror." As a feminist anthropologist and ethnographer, she uses intersectional frameworks to engage how gender, race, class, and sexuality shape formations of hierarchy and inequality in contemporary India and South Asian America. She is about to embark on an ethnographic project on how AI, Big Data, and predictive analytics are shaping lifeworlds in urban India. 

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