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In 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.
List of contents
Preface 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
About the author
Amit S. Rai is Senior Lecturer in New Media and Communication at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India's New Media Assemblage, also published by Duke University Press, and the coeditor of InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen.
Summary
Amit S. Rai shows how urban South Asians employ low-cost technological workarounds and hacks known as jugaad to solve problems, navigate, and resist India's neoliberal ecologies.
