Jugaad Time : Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India

In India, the practice of jugaad-finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems-emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation.In Jugaad Time Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone.Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power.Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad-as both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressive-Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.