Discussion of ‘Jugaad Time’ by Amit S RaiWednesday 9th October, 2019
5:00 pm, Arts Two Senior Common Room (4th Floor), QMUL
All are welcome to the South Asia Forum discussion of our colleague Amit S Rai’s new book, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke University Press, 2019). Amit, who is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at QMUL, will be in conversation with Gerard Hanlon (Professor of Organisational Sociology, QMUL), chaired by Shital Pravinchandra (Lecturer in Comparative Literature, QMUL). Participants are encouraged to read the Introduction to the book prior to meeting, available here: tinyurl.com/JugaadTimeIntro
Book Summary: “In India, the practice of jugaad—finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems—emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad—as both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressive—Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.”