Category: Book

From Pessimism to Promise. Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech

By Payal Arora

When it comes to tech, the mainstream headlines are bleak: Algorithms control and oppress. AI will destroy democracy and our social fabric, and possibly even drive us to extinction. While legitimate concerns drive these fears, we need to equally account for the fact that tech affords young people something incredibly valuable—a rare space for self-actualization. In From Pessimism to Promise, award-winning author Payal Arora explains that, outside the West, where most of the world’s youth reside, there is a significant different outlook on tech: in fact, there is a contagion of optimism toward all things digital. These users, especially those in marginalized contexts, are full of hope for new tech.

As AI disrupts sectors across industries, education, and beyond, who better to shine the light forward, Arora argues, than the Global South, the navigator of all manner of forced disruptions, leapfrogging obstructive systems, norms, and practices to rapidly reinvent itself? Drawing on field insights in diverse global contexts such as Brazil, India, and Bangladesh, Payal describes what drives Gen Z to embrace new technologies. From Pessimism to Promise discusses the shift to relationally-driven approaches to design; how to create “algorithms of aspiration”; how to reimagine the digital space for sex, pleasure, and care; and, what we can learn from feminist digital activists and women’s collectives in the Global South on shared digital provenance and value, as well as indigenous approaches to sustainability, that challenges sacred ideas on degrowth, circular economy, and the doughnut economy.

Read the book here.

Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor

By Juned Shaikh

Juned Shaikh’s richly researched and perceptively argued monograph, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor, subverts the idea that the various processes of modernity, including urbanization and industrial capitalism, would eventually diminish caste hierarchies and engender new social dynamics. As Shaikh shows, such modernist hopes remained unfulfilled in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial center of Bombay. Instead, “caste hid in plain sight in the city” (5). It not only sustained the growth and expansion of capitalism by facilitating industrial investments through caste and kinship credit networks but was also vital for the recruitment, disciplining, and housing of the city’s labor force. The book examines this “symbiotic relationship” between caste and capitalism by focusing on the built environment—housing policies and urban planning—and the language of Bombay’s Marxist and Dalit literature. In existing social histories of capitalism and labor in Bombay, questions of caste appear as inconsequential. Shaikh rightly points out that in the historical narrative of modern Bombay “Dalits are a marginal presence because they appear fleetingly in [official] sources like the Labour Gazette” (35). Shaikh has addressed this gap by exploring an impressive Marathi language archive and by incorporating the insights of Dalit studies into his excellent work.

Read the full book here.

Decolonizing ‘the field’ in the anthropology of Central Asia: ‘Being there’ and ‘being here’

By Alima Bissenova

This chapter is written in the spirit of contributing to the decolonization of Central Asian anthropology. Drawing on an analysis of the works of the Russian orientalist, Aleksei Levshin (1798-1879), and his Kazakh critic, Chokan Valikhanov (1835-1865), it analyses historical practices of ‘entry into the field’, ‘being in the field’, and publication of the results, i.e., ‘descriptions and stories of the field’, in the West and Russia before the so-called ‘reflexive’ and ‘postcolonial turns’. It examines what Clifford Geertz terms the ‘gap between engaging others where they are and representing them where they are not,’ and discuss how this gap continues to inflect the anthropology of Central Asia today.

Read the full chapter here.

Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain

By Arunima Datta

The expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia.

Delving into the stories of individual ayahs from a wide range of sources, Arunima Datta illuminates their brave struggle to assert their rights, showing how ayahs negotiated their precarious employment conditions, capitalized on social sympathy amongst some sections of the British population, and confronted or collaborated with various British institutions and individuals to demand justice and humane treatment.

In doing so, Datta re-imagines the experience of waiting. Waiting is a recurrent human experience, yet it is often marginalized. It takes a particular form within complex bureaucratized societies in which the marginalized inevitably wait upon those with power over them. Those who wait are often discounted as passive, inactive victims. This book shows that, in spite of their precarious position, the travelling ayahs of the British empire were far from this stereotype.

Read the book here.

Mapping Mental Well-Being in India Initial Reflections on the Role of Psychiatric Spaces

By Clément Bayetti, Sushrut Jadhav and Sumeet Jain

This paper explores how two different sites—a psychiatric department and a community mental health programme embedded in a district hospital in India—construct their own peculiar understanding of mental well-being and recovery. Focusing initially on the nature of the discourse and practice emerging from a psychiatry department, this article demonstrates how members of the psychiatric profession in India are socialised into a conception of well-being narrowly defined by an absence of symptoms. It highlights how such notions emerge from the intersection existing between global paradigms such as “evidence-based medicine” and psychiatry’s “technological paradigm”. The authors argue that such conceptions of well-being can in turn be considered as both the articulation and operationalisation of a neoliberal capitalist ideology in which the hospital turns into a socially credited market where people’s “broken minds” can be fixed through the administration of psychotropic drugs, and through which recovery is narrowly conceptualised as paid employment. While such understanding may increasingly appears to fulfil the expectations of various social classes within Indian society by providing them a gateway to a form of global citizenship, this paper also shows how such notions feed into a state sponsored agenda of cost cutting public health care resources, thus impacting upon the well-being of both patients and professionals. This analysis also traces the ways in which this medicalised understanding of well-being evolves as these constructions of well-being diffuse out into wider society and become embedded into the national community mental health programme. In doing so, the paper explores ways in which such understanding may be reappropriated by people suffering from mental ill health and their communities, and the role that this plays in their personal and collective recovery.

Read the chapter here,

Technoprecarious

By Precarity Lab*

Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves. 

This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.

Access the book here.

*Precarity Lab brings together an intergenerational network of scholars and activists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to explore how digital cultures produce, reproduce, and intervene in precarity. Anna Watkins Fisher, Silvia Lindtner, Ivan Chaar-Lopez, Cengiz Salman, McKenzie Wark, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, Cass Adair, Lisa Nakamura, Cindy Lin, with Meryem Kamil.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India

By Meenakshi Thapan

This book explores the development of a sociology of embodiment in the context of women’s lives in contemporary, urban India. Through a critical analysis of gender and class, the author unravels the complexities that are intrinsic to the multi-layered and fluid construction of a woman’s identity in relation to embodiment.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India is the first book that unfolds an understanding of women’s experience of embodiment by a careful analysis of the facts gathered from an Indian metropolis. The author brings out numerous voices representing multiple subjectivities through interviews of working class slum women, professional upper class women, adolescent young women in secondary schools and in a slum, and the visual and textual representation of women in a women’s magazine in English.

Read the book here.

Kitchen-table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-class Mothers in Urban Norway

By Marianne Gullestad

Through two years of anthropological fieldwork in the suburbs of Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, the author has listened carefully to the conversations of young working-class women. In this intimate study, she examines how the lives of these women are shaped, what dignity and self-respect mean to them, and how they define their identities as women. This book discusses topics such as the rising rate of divorce, women’s culture, and how these women play a crucial role in creating and maintaining a cultural lifestyle for their families.

Read the book here.

Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication

By Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla

For victims in sexual assault cases, trials rarely result in justice. Instead, the courts drag defendants, victims, and their friends and family through a confusing and protracted public spectacle. Along the way, forensic scientists, sexual assault nurse examiners, and police officers provide their insight and expertise, shaping the story that emerges for the judge and jury. These expert narratives intersect with the stories of victims, witnesses, and their communities to reproduce our cultural understandings of sexual violence, but too often this process results in reinscribing racial, gendered, and class inequalities.

Bodies in Evidence draws on observations of over 680 court appearances in Milwaukee County’s felony sexual assault courts, as well as interviews with judges, attorneys, forensic scientists, jurors, sexual assault nurse examiners, and victim advocates. It shows how forensic science helps to propagate public misunderstandings of sexual violence by bestowing an aura of authority to race and gender stereotypes and inequalities. Expert testimony reinforces the idea that sexual assault is physically and emotionally recognisable and always leaves material evidence. The court’s reliance on the presence of forensic evidence infuses these very familiar stereotypes and myths about sexual assault with new scientific authority.

Read the book here.

In The Belly Of The River : Tribal Conflicts Over Development In The Narmada Valley

By Amita Baviskar

Why are adivasis fighting the Narmada dam and other development projects in India today? Are adivasis ‘ecologically noble savages’ living in harmony with nature? What is the tribal relationship with nature today? How do people, whose struggles are the subject of theories of liberation and social change, perceive their own situation? Do their present circumstances allow adivasis to formulate a critique of ‘development’?

In the Belly of the River addresses these questions through an account of the lives of Bhilala adivasis in the Narmada valley who are fighting against displacement by the Sardar Sarovar dam in western India. On the basis of intensive fieldwork and historical research, this study places the tribal community in the context of its experience of state domination. Combining aspects of adivasi kinship and religion with the political economy of resource use, the book highlights the contradictions inherent in tribal relationships with nature – contradictions that permeate adivasi consciousness as well as practices

Read the book here.

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