Mobilizing the Youth? Peripatetic Labor in India’s New Service Economy

CASI Seminar
Carol Upadhya
Professor, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215

Listen to podcast (in conversation with Bilal Baloch, CASI Postdoctoral Research Fellow)

About the Speaker:
Carol Upadhya is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India, where she leads the Urban & Mobility Studies Programme. Prof. Upadhya is a social anthropologist who has researched and published extensively on diverse aspects of India’s post-independence development, including the social impacts of green revolution technology in a rice-farming region of southern India; the formation of Indian software capital and labor; transregional migration and diasporic development politics; and the urbanization of rural landscapes. She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (2016) and-co-editor of Provincial Globalization in India: Transregional Mobilities and Development Politics (2018). Prof. Upadhya is currently co-director of two major research projects: Speculative Urbanism: Land, Livelihoods, and Finance Capital, a comparative study of real estate-led urbanization in Jakarta and Bangalore, and India’s Changing Cityscapes: Work, Migration and Livelihoods. She is also carrying out a long-term study of the development of a new capital city in Andhra Pradesh.

About the Lecture:
Prof. Upadhya will trace the formation of an army of footloose workers catering to Bangalore’s new service economy. By exploring how rural youth are mobilized to labor in corporate service industries such as retail, logistics, and hospitality, the seminar will open up larger questions about new forms of work, changing aspirations, and the fractured pathways of social and spatial mobility in contemporary India.

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The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.