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.
ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE: STARTUP CAPITALISM1. Labor as Method: Exploring the Space-Time of Techno-capitalism2. Gendered Publics: Looking Back from the Startup City 3. Producing the Entrepreneur: Embodying and Gendering Value PART TWO: THE ENTREPRENEURIAL EVERYDAY4. The Office: From Entrepreneurial Exuberance to Embodied Exhaustion 5. Love in the Office Family: Infrastructures of Care 6. Testing the Future: Experiments in Everyday Life Conclusion: Feminist Itineraries for the Future Notes References Index
"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."