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.