Postcolonial Technologies, Developmental Leapfrogging, Jugaad Economics - Kavita Philip
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 2015-10-03

Kavita Philip
Associate Professor
History Department
UC Irvine 

Friday, October 2, 2015

Title: Postcolonial Technologies, Developmental Leapfrogging, Jugaad Economics

ABSTRACT
A range of business strategists, most famously C. K. Prahlad, have argued that India’s “bottom billion,” the people who live and work informally at the bottom of emerging economies, and with little assistance or recognition from the powers above, practice a form of flexible and inventive problem-solving that makes them the creative center of our economic and technological futures. How is it that a post-colonial economy regarded in the middle of the twentieth century as doomed by an exploding impoverished population came to be seen a half-century later as the beacon of hope for the future of global capitalist development? The study of what used to be called “Third World political economy” has been revivified by the spirit of jugaad, an improvisational, contingent ethic of practice that challenges both the assumptions of universal progress and romantic localism. This paper begins by exploring contingent, informal practices on the margins, but ends by considering how to re-frame stories about technological modernity.

BIO:
Kavita Philip is author of Civilizing Natures (2003 and 2004), and co-editor of the volumes Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (with Monshipouri, Englehart, and Nathan, 2003), Multiple Contentions (with Skotnes, 2003), Homeland Securities (with Reilly and Serlin, 2005), and Tactical Biopolitics (with da Costa, 2008). Her research interests are in transnational histories of science and technology; feminist technocultures; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory. Her work in progress includes a monograph entitled Proper Knowledge, and a co-authored book with Terry Harpold entitled Going Native: Cyberculture and Postcolonialism