Publisher's Synopsis
Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call centre 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 emphasises 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 globalised 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 labour, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility.
