Purnima Mankekar

About

Purnima Mankekar is a Professor and Vice Chair in the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1993. Her areas of interest include Feminist Media Studies, Post-9/11 Public Cultures, Affect Theories, Outsourcing and Information Technology, Transnational Cultural Studies, South Asian America, and South Asia. Her scholarly work explores media and cultural production, transnational erotics, and the affective organization of everyday life through various media forms. Mankekar has contributed to the understanding of television, erotics, and nationalism in postcolonial India, and her research has been recognized through awards such as the Fulbright Senior Faculty Research Award and the Distinguished Faculty Award from Stanford University. Her publications include edited volumes, special journal issues, and numerous scholarly articles that examine the intersections of media, culture, and transnationalism.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Media studies
• History
• Gender studies
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Intimate Encounters: Affective Labor in Call Centers

  positions asia critique · 2016-02-01 · 116 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, the authors argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are coimplicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, the authors join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor. This analysis of intimate encounters and affective labor draws upon several…

  PublisherDOI

• Future tense: Capital, labor, and technology in a service industry: The 2017 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2017-12-01 · 60 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. In this article, we focus on the affective dimensions of work in this industry. BPOs have led to contradictory outcomes such as upward mobility accompanied by precarity. Our research explores the complex interplay between wo…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The missed period

  American Ethnologist · 2019-10-10 · 35 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Business process outsourcing (BPO) industries providing customer service are characterized by three features: the product of labor is affect; affect is central to the labor process; and affect constitutes a crucial modality for the workers’ subject formation. This affective labor is distinctive in that workers’ connections to their customers are live, transnational, and interactive. Such BPOs constitute a form of capitalist production in which profits are based on the management and mon…

  PublisherDOI

• Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality

  2015-01-30 · 25 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In Unsettling India, Purnima Mankekar offers a new understanding of the affective and temporal dimensions of how India and "Indianness," as objects of knowledge production and mediation, circulate through transnational public cultures. Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi and the San Francisco Bay Area, Mankekar tracks the sense of unsettlement experienced by her informants in both places, disrupting binary conceptions of homeland and diaspora, and the national and trans…

  PublisherDOI

• Mobile love: moral panics, erotics and affect

  2021-11-19 · 19 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this chapter I extend my interest in erotics and media in urban India to the emergence of what I call “mobile love” in rural and small-town India where the mobile phone has become a resource and a flashpoint for new configurations of love, caste politics and virulent Islamophobia. Over the last decade, local self-governing bodies in some north Indian villages, known as khap panchayats, have banned the use of cell phones for young women. They allege that having access to cell phones leads to “…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Akhil Gupta

  45 shared

• Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

  40 shared

• Vasudha Dalmia

  37 shared

• Nilanjana Chatterjee

  36 shared

• Saleem Ahmadullah

  New York University

  36 shared

• Robert Horwitz

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  36 shared

• Sharon Hays

  36 shared

• Farah Zaib Khan

  36 shared

Awards & honors

• Fullbright Senior Faculty Research Award for research on cal…
• Distinguished Faculty Award, Asian American Studies, Stanfor…
• Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,…

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Min Zhouh-57
• Natalie Masuokah-19
• Cindy Sangalangh-16