Book Forum: Alex Taylor on Hemangini Gupta's Experimental Times
Experimental Times speaks to risk, flexibility, love and experimentations in time and global spaces. It’s a very evocative and emotional text which touched me greatly as I read it. It reads as unabashedly personal. There’s a braveness in this writing.
I have a connection to Bangalore as I have also undertaken fieldwork there. I have a strong memory of the chaos of the city back then: everything felt unfinished. Reading Experimental Times, I went back through my own photos and fieldnotes. The book captures this incompleteness of Bangalore in a way that sits in contrast with places in Europe and North America. Hemangini Gupta has adeptness in ethnographic storytelling, weaving throughout the book the structural concerns as well as the personal. Experimental Times explores familial connection and how we see these stories not just around us, but also in our lives. This was done well through the discussion of how to locate the self in a site speaking to one’s own histories while interacting with research participants and simultaneously offering structural analysis of the expansion of capitalism in the majority world and global south. Particularly moving was the story of her great-aunt and great-great-grandmother who resisted colonial modernity and created a longer arc of gendered publics in India.
A key chapter explores Gupta’s thinking about how risk is both practised on the ground in companies like Captivate, the focus of her ethnography in the book; as well as how risk seeds itself within entrepreneurial capitalism, feeding it. It’s not self-evident and situated naturally in the individual, but is produced specifically in contradistinction with caste- and gender-based work. “Bodies are read, and adhere to relevant scripts”, mediating structural concerns and confidantes’ life worlds (p.108). This was seen with Aliti, a woman trying to create a business who also has a family. Aliti has a business idea about children and tech, but the proposal is pushed back as it’s not risky enough and not masculinised enough.
Later in the book, when thinking with Captivate as an allegory for start-up capitalism, Gupta writes “it’s woven from low income families, who are the first professionals in their households, to form a class of precarious workers replaced by tech change; the surplus feminised labourer in capitalist work… bodies out of place, anxiety and trepidation; prepared to be the form of work and multicultural leisure that signal the global company” – expected feminine work is extracted and exploited in start-up capitalism, but these lives are also central to capitalist profit and the company being indexed as global and multicultural (p235). As professional employees, they contribute innovation and care to growing the company. That’s the feminist undoing in Hemangini Gupta’s beautiful book – we see the connections women make with Captivate being used to different ends. Labour is respecified and made sense of through bodies, bodies including her own, as the ethnographer.
Dr Alex Taylor is a Reader in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, with experience researching human and computer interactions and wider technological themes in both academic and industrial institutions.
