Experimental Times
Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India
$45.60
- Paperback
328 pages
- Release Date
11 March 2025
Summary
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.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520392779 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0520392779 |
| Author: | Dr. Hemangini Gupta |
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Imprint: | University of California Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 328 |
| Release Date: | 11 March 2025 |
| Weight: | 454g |
| Dimensions: | 23mm x 152mm x 229mm |
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Critics Review
“Gupta makes a much-needed contribution to the feminist study of startup capitalism and labour in the South, offering fresh insights at the intersection of cultural economy, gender studies and tech-capital in everyday life.” * LSE Review of Books *
“An incisive ethnography of Bengaluru’s metamorphosis from ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’ and public-sector town to IT outsourcing back office, and now to an innovation-forward start-up city.”
“Experimental Times shifts the focus of analysis on to affluent entrepreneurs in India’s startup capital, Bangalore, to explain that successful entrepreneurship is performatively grounded in gender and class privileges that enable an experimental approach to leisure, friendship, and class (be)longing.”
* The Journal of Development Studies *“A pioneering text in scholarship on postcolonial technological cultures.”
* Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience *“Gupta is a thoughtful and skilled qualitative scholar. Her descriptions are rich and colourful, whether she is writing about the monotony of her work sorting through marketing photos for Captivate or the bustle of Bangalore’s pubs.”
* Pacific Affairs *“A seminal ethnographic study that presents a deep analysis of how the work is feminized, utilized for affective aspects, performed across both private and public spaces, and subjected to precarious conditions of ‘unremunerated experimentation’.”
* Journal of Sociology *Dr. Hemangini Gupta
Hemangini Gupta is Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics and Associate Director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh.
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