Join us for a discussion of “Politics of Gender in Work and Innovation in India and China.”

Drawing on ethnographic research of design practices in post-liberalization India, Prof. Lilly Irani traces how designers target everyday acts of social reproduction as sites of intervention and valorization through design intervention. She makes the case with stories of water cooling, contrasting devalued water cooling practices characterized as jugaad or workaround with proper, branded products recognizable as innovation. These contrasting categories act as signposts to see how design practices proposed as participatory and inclusive can still reproduce class, caste, and gender hierarchies in contemporary India. She draws from Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Prof. Yige Dong draws on a case study of Zhengzhou, a city located in China’s heartland that has transformed from a major textile mill town in the socialist period to the world largest iPhone manufacturing center in the last decade. Extending the analytical focus from the factory shop floor to the space of social reproduction, this talk discusses how dynamics in the realm of gender and care work has constituted the processes of political economy and shaped the outcomes of China’s industrial development.

SPEAKERS

Lilly Irani
Associate Professor
Communication, Science Studies, Computer Science, Critical Gender Studies, Design Lab
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Culture and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of New Technology, Work, and Employment and Design and Culture. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.

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Yige Dong
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Department of Global Gender & Sexuality Studies
UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Yige Dong, PhD, is an assistant professor in the UB Department of Sociology and in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Prof. Dong’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of political economy, social inequality, and social change. Currently, she is working on a book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the changing politics of care in China’s industrial sector in the past century. Prof. Dong has been awarded the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies (2021-2022).

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DISCUSSANT

Ying Chen
Assistant Professor
Economics; Director of Undergraduate Studies and Departmental Faculty Advisor, Economics
THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Ying Chen is Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work explores the contradictions within capitalism and how they exhibit themselves. Topics she has studied include economic development, labor, and climate change, with a special focus on the global south. She has published in journals including Environment and Development Economics, Economics and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor and Society, Review of Radical Political Economics, International Review of Applied Economics, and so on. She was also consulted for the working of the UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2021.

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