Aspirations and Contestations: ICT and New Subjectivities Among Subaltern Youth

• In Event: ICTs and Marginalized Populations

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in New Delhi in 2014, my paper examines ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) training and “personality grooming” programs for urban, marginalized youth that are initiated by a corporate Foundation in the “resettlement colony” of Madanpur Khadar. Khadar is formed through the violence of the state in conjunction with elite middle-class interests. I draw from critical-cultural and feminist scholarship to understand complex aspirations and new subjectivities produced by new development initiatives in “Emerging India.” My ethnographic interviews and observations with subaltern youth highlight transformation narratives of producing the modern, “hygienic” worker and emergent, unsettled subjectivities. The youth form critical mediators of popular policy discourses in asking for an “education” versus “training.” Further, they redefine their imaginations of “successful” work that contradict popular, global discourses of the desirable worker in the knowledge economy.

Author

• Sreela Sarkar, Santa Clara University