Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade Review"
Jugaad Time will be of great interest to an array of scholars of South Asia who are committed to ethnographically and historically examining assemblages of affect, media technologies, and temporality. The book offers a novel and important opportunity for these scholars to examine how the Global South is implicated in and by innovation studies." -- Anisha Chadha * Visual Anthropology Review *
"Researchers of waste, maintenance, and repair or of the Anthropocene will be interested in
jugaad and
jugaadus, and Rai’s offering is a welcome challenge to the innovation-dominated framings of consumer capitalist marketing. . . . Even as he emphasizes Indian experiences of
jugaad, Rai shows us a way toward wider understandings of how information technologies interlock with contingent and individuated labor to produce the subjectivities of a digital neoliberalism." -- Juris Milestone * Exertions *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction. A Political Ecology of Jugaad 1
Fables of the Reinvention I. Toward a Universal History of Hacking 39
1. The Affect of Jugaad: "Frugal Innovation" and the Workaround Ecologies of Postcolonial Practice 45
2. Neoliberal Assemblages of Perception and Digital Media in India 68
Fables of the Reinvention II. New Desiring Machines 102
3. Jugaad Ecologies of Social Reproduction 106
4. Diagramming Affect: Smart Cities and Plasticity in India's Informal Economy 128
Fables of the Reinvention III. A Series of Minor Events 150
Conclusion. Jugaad Jugaading: Time, Language, Misogyny in Hacking Ecologies 153
Notes 167
References 175
Index 203
