Search

Since 2013, when the first urban Heat Action Plan (HAP) in India was developed in and for the western city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, there are now more than 30 HAPs focused on different cities, regions, and entire states in the country, many following the original template developed in Ahmedabad. This essay inquires into the temporal and spatial politics of such heat action planning, asking: what is the nature of thermal governance that HAPs posit? Based on our analysis, we suggest that two key attributes characterize Indian HAPs: first, they enframe heat waves as disasters; second, as the Ahmedabad template has travelled to other locations, HAPs have ceased to engage with their local contexts in any meaningful way. We further argue that such a conceptualization of HAPs has produced important obfuscations, shaping official knowledge about and responses to extreme heat in ways that are unable to grapple with the messy, uneven, and contested nature of the socio-political terrains in which they are supposed to intervene.

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on the development of The Asthma Files, a collaborative ethnography project to understand the cultural dimensions of environmental health, and on the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, digital infrastructure first built to support The Asthma Files but now available as a community resource for archiving, analyzing, and publishing ethnographic data and writing. A key finding is that different traditions and practices of ethnography require different infrastructures. © 2021 Finnish Society for Science and Technology Studies. All rights reserved.

This dissertation focuses on the production of burnout among mid-career IT professionals in the city of Hyderabad, India. My analysis is oriented by two main questions: What is said to produce to burnout among IT workers? Why do IT workers continue to work under conditions that they experience as being extremely stressful? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic interviews with IT workers in Hyderabad, participant observation, and analysis of primary and secondary literature, I argue that burnout among IT workers is produced at the intersection of significant political-economic and cultural shifts. These include, for example, the altered nature of work in the new economy, the blurring between personal and professional space/time, and the cultural privileging of IT-based employment that effectively locks individuals into IT work with seemingly no other options. Employment in the Information Technology (IT) industry has come to symbolize the promise of securing middle-class status and associated livelihoods in post-liberalization India. As a significant body of scholarship demonstrates, this promise has resulted in deep cultural, educational, institutional, and political-economic reorientations in order to facilitate the growth of the IT industry in India. These reorientations, however, have also produced an experience of high stress -- often referred to as burnout in popular discourse -- among some IT professionals. While the making of the new Indian middle class in relation to IT-based work has been investigated at length in scholarly literature, the associated production of occupational stress, i.e. burnout, has received scant attention. My research aims to address this gap. Overall, it contributes to furthering empirical and theoretical understandings of IT-based work in India under contemporary conditions of globalisation.