Bangalore: migration, boundary-drawing and the worlds of work

Ramaiah, Chinmayi and Vasudevan, Nitya (2026) Bangalore: migration, boundary-drawing and the worlds of work. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. pp. 1-28. ISSN 1464-9373

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Abstract

The idea of the digital everyday helps us to investigate how young women in Bangalore understand and experience digital intimacy, cultivate digital selves, and forge new ways of negotiating the realms of family, marriage, social relationships, and education/employment. Analysing interviews with thirty-one young women (aged 18-24) from a range of social backgrounds, migration histories, digital histories and educational institutions, we discuss the complex nature of the digital as habitus in a city like Bangalore, in terms of how offline social life shapes and is shaped by digitally intimate practices. Histories of migration, aspirations surrounding education and marriage, and ideas of social and economic mobility—all of these aspects come to centrally inform the ways in which we situate the experiences of our interlocutors. As a city, Bangalore has a long history of being shaped by the discourse of scientific modernity, and has arrived at its twenty-first century form as the “IT capital” of India where daily practices are tied to the apparatuses of technologized life. The essay discusses the practices related to digital intimacy and subjectivity in the everyday lives of our interlocutors, arguing that the social locations the young women belong to do impact certain modes of relating digitally, and that they occupy the digital space through (instead of beyond) the physical location of the city as ecosystem. At the same time, the digital everyday offers them ways of shifting and managing traditional social barriers, and disturbs existing binaries in how we conceptualise social life, closeness and institutional control.

Item Type:	Article
Authors:	Ramaiah, Chinmayi and Vasudevan, Nitya
Document Language:	Language English
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Digital everyday, digital intimacy, digital labour, migration, Bangalore
Subjects:	Social sciences > Sociology & anthropology > Social interaction Social sciences > Sociology & anthropology > Culture & institutions Technology
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Arts and Sciences
Full Text Status:	None
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/7558
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2026.2636445

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