Encoding race, encoding class : Indian IT workers in Berlin / Sareeta Bipin Amrute.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Amrute, Sareeta Bipin, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Computer programmers--Germany--Berlin.

Computer programmers.

Computer programmers--India.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 268 pages) : illustrations

Other Title:

Encoding Race, Encoding Class

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2016.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways. -- Publisher description.

Contents:

Introduction: cognitive workers, cognitive bodies

ENCODING RACE

Imagining the Indian IT body

The postracial office

Proprietary freedoms in an IT office

ENCODING CLASS

The stroke of midnight and the spirit of entrepreneurship : a history of the computer in India

Computers are very stupid cooks : reinventing leisure as a politics of pleasure

The traveling diaper bag : gifts and jokes as materializing immaterial labor

A speculative conclusion : secrets and lives.

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781478091875

1478091878