‘They are male but not men’: Joblessness, platform enterprising, and the cultural production of ‘serious young men’ in North India

Under Review

Shantanu Kulshreshth

Cite

APA Click to copy
Kulshreshth, S. ‘They are male but not men’: Joblessness, platform enterprising, and the cultural production of ‘serious young men’ in North India.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Kulshreshth, Shantanu. “‘They Are Male but Not Men’: Joblessness, Platform Enterprising, and the Cultural Production of ‘Serious Young Men’ in North India” (n.d.).

MLA Click to copy
Kulshreshth, Shantanu. ‘They Are Male but Not Men’: Joblessness, Platform Enterprising, and the Cultural Production of ‘Serious Young Men’ in North India.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{shantanu-a,
  title = {‘They are male but not men’: Joblessness, platform enterprising, and the cultural production of ‘serious young men’ in North India},
  author = {Kulshreshth, Shantanu}
}

Abstract

Drawing on 14 month long ethnographic fieldwork in North India, this article analyses the ways in which young marginalised people in the global south are navigating social and economic transformations associated with platformisation in their everyday lives. Complimenting political economic analyses of platform work and neoliberalism, I focus on a set of young men working as online resellers who styled themselves as ‘serious’ to look at young people's bodily and affective navigation of 'online' work amidst crises of joblessness. In doing so, I bring together youth and cultural geographies to provide a ‘thick’ account of the spatialities of platform work in the global south by foregrounding young people’s agency and practice amidst a range of social and economic crises.

Keywords: youth; platformisation; work; neoliberalism; enterprise; global south