Experimental Times is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labor in India's current economy.
Hemangini Gupta is Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics and Associate Director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh.
"With a careful and creative ethnographic eye, Hemangini Gupta explores the dynamics of startup culture and capital in one of its global centers, Bangalore. Here she finds a new and important story around the gendered and racialized underpinnings of the information age, meanwhile sharing the rich, though often precarious, forms of social life surrounding the ideal of entrepreneurship."—Kalindi Vora, Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
"Experimental Times offers a way of understanding the queer and feminist possibilities of speculative, technologized, and financialized forms of capitalism without being utopian or celebratory. It makes methodological contributions to Feminist Studies and Science and Technology Studies through the formulation of 'labor-as-method' as a way of understanding 'the Global South,' not necessarily as difference but through the generative possibilities of differences."—Sareeta Amrute, Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management, The New School
"A rich and original exploration of everyday worlds of work and the forms of experimentation set in motion by the startup economy in India. The blending of rich ethnographic detail and insightful theoretical interventions will stimulate discussion about digital startup cultures in India and beyond."—Radha Sarma Hegde, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
328 pp.6 x 9Illus: 15 b/w illustrations
9780520392779$29.95|£25.00Paper
Dec 2024