Friends, colleagues, please join us for the August instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Akhil Gupta (UCLA, University of Melbourne). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.
Date: Thursday 3 August
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122
(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)
The Many Futures of Global Capitalism
In academic literature as much as in popular culture, call centres have set off enormous debates about the outsourcing of service sector jobs in a global economy. While we engage the political economic consequences of labour arbitrage, our primary focus is on the interplay of affective labour, futurity, and informatics to understand the sociocultural implications of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). We propose that the proliferation of disjunctive temporalities is key to understanding this interplay in the contemporary conjuncture of global capitalism. Since the opening of the first call centre in 1999, the BPO industry has grown rapidly to employ about 700,000 people with gross revenues of US $26 billion in 2015. Based on long-term and diachronic fieldwork with workers in three different companies in Bangalore, our objective in this project is to ethnographically examine the futurities spawned by intertwined processes of rapid transformation and stagnation, aspiration and anxiety, upward social mobility and precarity—in short, the disjunctive temporalities undergirding India’s “New Economy.”
Biography
Akhil Gupta is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for India and South Asia at the University of California Los Angeles. His work explores themes of transnational capitalism, postcoloniality, globalisation, infrastructure, and corruption. His field 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. He is the author of, among other things, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke University Press 1998) and Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Duke University Press 2012), and has edited, among other things, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science with James Ferguson (University of California Press 1997) and The Indian State After Liberalization, with Kalyanakrishnan Shivaramakrishnan (Routledge 2010). He is currently doing a long-term research field project on call centers in Bangalore.