Nov. 4th 2024

12:30pm

Building E51 Room 095

Join us in hearing about Prof. Mathangi Krishnamurthy in their examination of the primacy of a particular kind of work that produced the world and worldliness, for a set of men in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in an India navigating the move from socialism to neoliberalism. Recruited from various parts of the country to erect, commission, and run a chemical plant from the late 1970s until the mid 2000s, these men, engineers, who have now retired, lived in an industrial township in semi-rural India located between the metropolitan cities of Bombay and Pune in western Maharashtra. For varying periods ranging from five to thirty years, they forged lives moving back and forth between their place of work, an artifact called “the plant” and factories in the US, which they took apart and put together even while forging friendships, camaraderie and long-term relationships with their American counterparts. Using oral histories, ethnographic interviews and participant observation, Krishnamurthy argues that this form of work, navigating diverse locales across the global North and South, testifies to a particular form of developmental modernity and masculinity, and investigate what this might suggest for our current understandings of gender in the political economy.