The Future of Futurity

In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in Indias business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurityan affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of timeenables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futuritys imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.