Building Cross‐Sector Careers in India's New Service Economy? Tracking Former Call Centre Agents in the National Capital Region

This article presents findings from a labour mobility survey of 250 former call centre agents in India's National Capital Region (September 2008) exploring individuals’ employment before, during and immediately after leaving India's high‐profile call centre ‘industry’. These data are combined with forty‐two in‐depth interviews conducted in India's NCR (July 2006 to August 2008) with call centre agents, managers, ex‐call centre agents, labour organizers and economic development officials, as well as representatives from different labour market intermediaries. The study gives a cautiously optimistic account about the call centre work and employment opportunities on offer in India's ‘IT Enabled Services – Business Processing Outsourcing’ (or ITES‐BPO) industry, and their implications for young urban middle class graduates based on: (i) the movement of around one fifth of the ex‐call centre agent sample into further study, facilitated by relatively high call centre salaries; (ii) the movement of ex‐call centre agents into higher paying job roles in a wide range of sectors including banking, IT, insurance, marketing, real estate and telecommunications; and (iii) the development of transferable skills in Indian call centres that are recognized by ex‐call centre agents and their subsequent employers as conferring a labour market advantage in other sectors of India's new service economy relative to colleagues without prior call centre work experience.     

On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define communities by the violence they suffer, abolition ecologies call for attention to radical place‐making and the land, air and water based environments within which places are made. To that end, we suggest that an abolition ecology demands attention to the ways that coalitional land‐based politics dismantle oppressive institutions and to the promise of abolition, which Gilmore describes as making “freedom as a place”.     

Cruel and unusual

From early April to late June 2018, the nearly 2,600 immigrant children – mostly refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Central America – were forcibly taken from their parents at the United States’ southern border following implementation of the Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy. The policy took effect when the US Justice Department began aggressively prosecuting undocumented immigrants crossing the US‐Mexico border. Following a public outcry and growing protests, President Trump issued an executive order declaring an end to family separations on 20 June. Several days later, a federal court mandated that the government reunite those immigrant families affected by the ‘zero tolerance’ policy. In mid‐August, more than 550 children who had been detained following the implementation of the policy remained in federal custody. Thousands more ‘unaccompanied minors’ – typically teenagers who were caught crossing the border without adults –remain in indefinite detention. This editorial analyzes this situation from an anthropological perspective by reviewing relevant ethnographic literature on undocumented Latin American immigrants in the US.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 5. October 2018

Front and back cover caption, volume 34 issue 5 Front cover TRUMP'S ‘ZERO TOLERANCE’ CHILDREN From early April to late June 2018, nearly 2,600 immigrant children – mostly refugees fleeing violence and poverty in Central America – were forcibly taken from their parents at the United States’ southern border following implementation of the Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Prior to being sent to detention facilities located throughout the country, children were held in Border Patrol ‘processing centres’ like this one located in a converted warehouse in McAllen, Texas. The US Department of Homeland Security released photos of the facility, some of which revealed small children huddled on mats, wrapped in Mylar blankets. Following a public outcry and growing protests, President Trump issued an executive order declaring an end to family separations on 20 June. Several days later, a federal court mandated that the government reunite immigrant families affected by the ‘zero tolerance’ policy. Even so, in mid‐August, more than 550 children who had been detained following the implementation of the policy remained in federal custody. Thousands more ‘unaccompanied minors’ – typically teenagers who were caught crossing the border without adults – remain in indefinite detention. The Trump administration's ‘zero tolerance’ policy raises broader questions about how refugees are treated – not only in the US, but in Europe, China, Australia and other parts of the world. At a time when many countries are experiencing resurgent forms of racism and the rise of authoritarian right‐wing politicians, how should anthropologists respond? Back Cover GANESHA in THAILAND For increasing numbers of Thais, the ritual worship of the elephant‐headed god Ganesha is providing new ways for attaining prosperity. Although Ganesha devotion is hardly new to practitioners of Theravada Buddhism, in the past five years, the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai has experienced a boom in the establishment and patronage of dedicated Ganesha institutions. With the new institutions come Ganesha‐related ritual events, merit‐making and the collective effervescence of festival revelry. At this 2017 Ganesha Chaturthi opening day parade at the Ganesha Museum in Chiang Mai province, devotees tow a giant float through the crowds. Here, sacred Ganesha dons distinctly Indian‐style attire as he lounges in a howdah atop an elephant. Other participants in the parade include teachers and students from three local elementary schools, and women from 11 local village housewives' associations. On the back of recent economic downturns, political and existential crises notwithstanding, what makes this Hindu god become the centre of a new Thai prosperity cult? Ganesha has long been worshipped as the god of new beginnings and the remover of obstacles. He is also associated with the creative arts. But today, Thais are increasingly turning to him for their physical and financial health problems, and new media and spirit mediums contribute to exciting new forms of enchantment. In this issue, Ayuttacorn & Ferguson explore how two Ganesha institutions in Chiang Mai facilitate these processes, and create new kinds of sacred, symbolic packages for spiritual assistance.     

Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

Vallejo and the End of History

This article studies the intersections of racial, gender, and national subjectivities in Marta Rojas's novel, Santa Lujuria o Papeles de blanco (1998). I examine the entanglement of fiction and historical memory as well as the (re)appropriation and (re)construction of the slave experience as a vindication of anti-imperialist discourses. By focusing on the depictions of conflicts of race and class set in the colonial period, I also analyze the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento (racial and cultural whitening) and the myth of the eroticized mulatta. Furthermore, I maintain that this novel contributes to the intellectual articulation of new forms of racialization in the Cuban context, while confronting the traditional rhetoric of White supremacy.     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.     

‘From motives of generosity,as well as self‐preservation’: Thomas Branagan,Colonization, and the Gradual Emancipation Movement

The idea of colonizing free blacks in areas distant from white settlement has had a long history in the American antislavery movement. A decade before the American Colonization Society formed in 1817, an Irish immigrant in Philadelphia, Thomas Branagan, argued that creating a black settlement in the newly‐acquired Louisiana Purchase territories would encourage slaveholders to emancipate their bondspersons while also saving white society from a number of ills he associated with a biracial society, most notably racial mixing, poverty and violence. Branagan’s plan never gained acceptance, but the idea of sending free blacks to the American West to encourage emancipation did catch the attention of gradual emancipationists associated with the American Convention of Abolitionists. This group considered a similar scheme as the lesser of two evils once the Colonization Society began its campaign to send America’s blacks “back” to Africa. Neither plan met with success, but their existence reveals an important link between colonization and the early antislavery movement.     

United by a Common Language? Trade Union Responses in the UK and India to Call Centre Offshoring

Abstract: The offshoring of business processes from the global North to low‐cost countries of the global South has grown spectacularly in the current decade. Self‐evidently, transnational relocation presents considerable challenges for organised labour since it suggests both a ‘race to the bottom’ in respect of pay, conditions and workers' rights and wholesale redundancies in the developed economies. This paper examines the specific case of the migration of call centres from the UK to India and trade union responses in both geographies. Informed by theoretical developments, insights and evidence from diverse disciplines and literatures, the authors concur particularly with Herod's conviction that union strategies to counter TNCs should not be counterposed between ‘organising globally’ and ‘organising locally’and that ‘organising at both scales simultaneously may best serve their goals’. Following reflection upon the nature of the call centre and consideration of important contradictions in the offshoring process, we present evidence of UK union responses ranging from the nationalistic, even xenophobic, to the internationalsist, and conclude that membership mobilisation on a principled basis has been key to the limited successes unions have achieved. The paper also evaluates developments in India and the emergence of an embryonic organisation UNITES which is attempting to organise its call centre and business process outsourcing (BPO) workforce. We conclude by considering the gap between the potential and the reality of effective internationally co‐ordinated union activity.     

The selected representation of contested prison history: memorial exhibitions and tourist experiences

The Jing-Mei Detention Centre, Taipei, is one of the primary sites associated with the ‘White Terror’, which took place during the imposition of Martial Law in Taiwan (1949–1987), by the authoritarian post-war regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan’s intelligence agencies violated civil rights and liberties. Suspects suffered arrest, interrogation, torture, trial, and imprisonment. The former detention centre has become Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, which is one of two penal facilities dealing with the processing of political prisoners and for the suppression of activists who struggled for human rights. This study focuses on the interpretation by visitors of exhibitions at the site and the process of historical representation at the memorial park. The roles of the relevant parties were identified through interviews with former prisoners. The selection criteria, and the approaches to interpretation employed by the exhibition planners to represent a contested history, were examined. An analysis of visitor experiences and interaction with historical interpretation and layout in the exhibition demonstrated the visitors’ disoriented, yet unified, perceptions. A model of prison history has been developed that selects the memories and materials used to depict the past, unifying the multiple layers of histories during the ‘White Terror’.     

Politics of presence: women’s safety and respectability at night in Mumbai,India

This article focuses on women’s mobility in urban public space in Mumbai, India while working night shifts in outsourced call centres. The outsourced call centre industry is heralded as the beacon of modernity, and its entry was facilitated under a neoliberal political economy. This industry disproportionately employs women relative to India’s broader Information Technology sector, resulting in high numbers of women commuting at night. The state has reworked safety-centred policies for women working night shifts in call centres, which have been differentially implemented by companies. Expanding on this variegation, I sketch out the nightscape of transportation and mobility around outsourced call centres. This article analyses how women conceive of safety, as well as its interplay with convenience and considerations of respectability while making decisions about navigating urban public space at night. Women working in call centres find themselves in the crosshairs of narratives that demonize them as ‘bad women’ for being out on the street at night, while working in industries that specifically seek women willing to work in night shifts. Their navigation of this paradox exposes contradictions within the neoliberal modernization of Mumbai and the meaning of public safety for women who make this modernization possible through their labour.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

Slavery in black and white: the racialisation of (male) slavery in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and/vs. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This article revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as illustrative of the ‘birth’ of whiteness as ideology and, in particular, of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. To do so, it compares Douglass’s text to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), which traces the origins of the slave trade back to the seventeenth century, when American slavery was not fully ‘racialised’ yet. While Morrison focuses on the earliest stage of the increasing (class) animosity among different types of servants and slaves, black and white, Douglass’s nineteenth-century Narrative already reveals the explicitly racialised association of human bondage with non-whiteness. I argue that Morrison’s novel may thus be interpreted as a ‘prequel’ to Douglass, whose Narrative illustrates the increasing racialisation of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, but also elaborates on its class and gender biases. In this sense, the essay concludes that Douglass shows how the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy over both black men and women entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which, if not in form, ended up transforming them into virtual ‘slaves’.     

Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment

Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare policy, including decisions about the eligibility of immigrant residents. Leveraging state‐level data from before and after reform, we estimate a difference‐in‐difference model to identify the effect of variation in immigrant inclusivity on educational attainment. We find that when states broaden the inclusivity of the social safety net to immigrants, young Latinos are more likely to graduate from high school. This effect is present beyond the group of Latino residents who receive additional benefits, suggesting that policy decisions about immigrants spill over to broader communities and communicate broader messages about social inclusion to racial and ethnic groups. We find similar patterns among Asian youth, but not among black and non‐Hispanic white youth. We conclude that immigrant inclusion has consequences for the life prospects of the growing population of youth in high‐immigrant ethnic groups.     

Who Deserves Solidarity? Unequal Treatment of Immigrants in Swiss Welfare Policy Delivery

Rising immigration rates in Western Europe concur with increasing anti‐immigrant attitudes. While assessments of welfare eligibility in the United States demonstrably hinge on how public servants perceive different racial groups as deserving, we know less about ethnically motivated discrimination in the European context. This paper argues that Switzerland is a critical case for studying such developments. It combines social construction theory and the deservingness heuristic to analyze how social constructions of Swiss natives and immigrants influence 90 disability benefits insurance procedures. Findings reveal that immigrants are perceived as less deserving and less powerful than Swiss applicants. Thus, Swiss welfare workers do not allocate welfare benefits independently of an applicant's nationality. Our results raise fundamental questions about the equal treatment of welfare applicants in times of rising immigration and anti‐immigrant attitudes. The feed‐forward effects of social constructions imply longer‐term consequences for good administrative practices and society that require scholarly attention.     

Mapping the Contours of Race: Griffith Taylor's Zones and Strata Theory

This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor – regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia – who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's ‘zones and strata’ portrayal of racial evolution, and other geological‐ style maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.     

Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti‐Abortion Movement's Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia Since the 1960s

This article provides a genealogy of foetocentric grief, an emotion that permeates accounts of abortion in Australia across multiple discursive sites. Foetocentric grief represents women as indelibly mourning their ‘unborn children’ after abortion. The emotion first came to prominence in anti‐abortion activism of the mid‐1980s. Focus on the purported consequences of abortion for women enabled anti‐abortionists to respond to charges that they were unsympathetic towards women who have abortions. Foetocentric grief also transcribes the primary claim of the anti‐abortion movement – that abortion entails a mother's destruction of her unborn child – onto the very experience of abortion. Since the mid‐1980s, foetocentric grief has moved outside the anti‐abortion movement to dominate accounts of the abortion experience in the print media as well as, surprisingly, mainstream pro‐choice activism. This article maps the convergence of these trends and examines the political and regulatory effects of foetocentric grief. It argues that foetocentric grief is a culturally enforced emotion that discursively recuperates the figure of the aborting woman to normative regimes of pregnancy and femininity, where pregnant women are envisaged as already mothers to autonomous foetal‐subjects.     

Navigating the Fault Lines: Race and Class in Philadelphia's Solidarity Economy

In debates over post‐capitalist politics, growing attention has been paid to the solidarity economy (SE), a framework that draws together diverse practices ranging from co‐ops to community gardens. Despite proponents’ commitment to inclusion, racial and class divides suffuse the SE movement. Using qualitative fieldwork and an original SE dataset, this article examines the geospatial composition of the SE within the segregated geography of Philadelphia. We find that though the SE as a whole is widely distributed across the city, it is, with the exception of community gardens, largely absent from poor neighborhoods of color. We also identify SE clusters in racially and economically diverse border areas rather than in predominantly affluent White neighborhoods. Such findings complicate claims about the SE's emancipatory potential and underscore the need for its realignment towards people of color and the poor. We conclude with examples of how the SE might more fully address racial injustice.     

Normalizing urban inequality: cinematic imaginaries of difference in postcolonial Amsterdam

Combining insights from critical urban studies with geographies of race and racism, this article examines the role of spatial imaginaries in normalizing urban inequalities, showing how such imaginaries make the associations between places and populations appear natural. We extend analyses of the interplay between material landscapes and imaginative geographies to examine how these connections feature in processes of gentrification and displacement and emphasize the necessity of an intersectional approach in understanding the cultural underpinnings of urban change. We propose that such analyses of dominant spatial imaginaries benefit from attention to their colonial roots, given the persistence of monomythical explorer-hero narratives and the mapping of reworked colonial imaginative geographies onto contemporary postcolonial cities. Our analysis focuses on Amsterdam, the popular Dutch film Alleen Maar Nette Mensen and the spatiality of difference that its ‘monomyth’ narrative presents. It justifies an unequal urban order by contrasting Amsterdam’s city centre, which is depicted as White, middle-class and ‘civilized’, with the post-war urban periphery, which is cast as a mysterious place of racialized poverty, squalor and pathological behaviour. This culturally essentialist depiction contributes to the depoliticization of state-led gentrification and normalizes changes to the material cityscape.