The Future of Futurity (Paperback)

Purnima Mankekar

ISBN 10: 1478031530 / ISBN 13: 9781478031536

Published by Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2025

About this Item

Paperback. In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in Indias business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurityan affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of timeenables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futuritys imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity. Examines the lives and experiences of call center agents in Indias Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781478031536

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Future of Futurity (Paperback)
• Publisher: Duke University Press, North Carolina
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478031530
• ISBN 13: 9781478031536
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.

About the Author

Purnima Mankekar is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, Gender Studies, and Film, TV, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Akhil Gupta is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.