Event

Hemangini Gupta

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India

Experimental Times (University of California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of a technology city in India from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. This talk is based on the book and 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 of Bangalore/Bengaluru. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, it details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labor in India's current digital economy.

Hemangini Gupta is a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (University of California Press, 2024) and has research interests in feminist and queer theory, racial capitalism, and digital economies. Her ethnographic research has examined new forms of feminist activism under neoliberalism; the gendered and racialized formations of global startup capitalism; and the materialities of data infrastructures and labor. Alongside her academic work, she has curated multimodal exhibitions of photography, video and material artifacts exploring speculative urbanism in the Global South and a series of video essays on startup worlds in India.