India’s global success in the Information Technology industry has also prompted the growth of neoliberalism and the re-emergence of the middle class in contemporary urban areas, such as Bangalore. In her significant study, BITS of Belonging, Simanti Dasgupta shows that this economic shift produces new forms of social inequality while reinforcing older ones. She investigates this economic disparity by looking at IT and water privatization to explain how these otherwise unrelated domains correspond to our thinking about citizenship, governance, and belonging.
Dasgupta’s ethnographic study shows how work and human processes in the IT industry intertwine to meet the market stipulations of the global economy. Meanwhile, in the recasting of water from a public good to a commodity, the middle class insists on a governance and citizenship model based upon market participation. Dasgupta provides a critical analysis of the grassroots activism involved in a contested water project where different classes lay their divergent claims to the city.
What urban food networks reveal about middle class livability in times of transformation
In recent years, the concept of “livability” has captured the global imagination, influencing discussions about the implications of climate change on human life and inspiring rankings of “most livable cities” in popular publications. But what really makes for a livable life, and for whom?
Cultivating Livability takes Bengaluru, India, as a case study—a city that is alternately described as India’s most and least livable megacity, where rapid transformation is undergirded by inequalities evident in the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Anthropologist Camille Frazier probes the meaning of “livability” in Bengaluru through ethnographic work among producers and consumers, corporate intermediaries and urban information technology professionals.
Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she reveals how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press