How do we study contemporary forms of startup capitalism under which work unfolds seemingly everywhere? How do we study labour when it is presented to us as enjoyable and fun, and as not work at all? This talk offers one conceptual navigation of these times, developing “labour as method” to meet the fragmentation of work and life across city spaces, sites of work and home, and blurred boundaries between labour and leisure. Drawing on fieldwork and multimodal collaborative video making conducted in the entrepreneurial economy of Bangalore/Bengaluru, India, “labour as method” unfolds the ideals of startup capitalism—tenets of risk, flexibility, experimentation—by locating the work of caste, class, and gender that animate them.

Dr. Hemangini Gupta is a Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Her monograph, Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India was published by the University of California Press, and her writing has appeared in Feminist Studies, Antipode, feminist review, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience amongst others.