Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma
Mythri Prasad-Aleyamma is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on the politics of labor, migration, and urban transformation in contemporary India. It traces the different types of recruitment of migrant and local labor in Kerala that reflect political contests and settlements between trade unions, corporate construction companies, and recruitment agencies. Another strand of her research focuses on the politics of indigeneity in Arunachal Pradesh in the North-East of India in the context of urban land governance, dam building, and migration. She has published articles and essays in Antipode, Contemporary South Asia, Society & Space Magazine, and Economic and Political Weekly.
Collected Work
“Book Review: Mallika Shakya. 2018. Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal”
This review evaluates an important addition to the anthropology of industrial growth and decline in South Asia. Mallika Shakya's ethnography of the garment industry in Nepal is as much a close look at entrepreneurship, labor practices, and trade unions as it is a commentary on US trade policy, uneven development, and Maoist revolutionary politics.
“Touch and Tech: Labor and the Work of the Pandemic”
The pandemic has changed the meaning of both touch and tech. It has drawn a line across occupations, work processes, and industries. It is a specific moment where production is separated not into the production of services and goods, but ones that are touch-based and tech-based.
“Crisis and the Everyday: Global Connections, Resistance, and Solidarity”
This essay introduces a collection of articles that reflect the tension between the truncated globality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the contradictions and conflicts that are immanent within capitalism. The authors discuss the differentiated impact of the pandemic on workers. In doing that, they remind us that it is important to reflect on our own position as teacher-workers and researcher-workers even as we write about workers who may belong in a different world of work. Often exposed to far greater levels of precarity, danger, and exploitation, the experiences of migrant, factory, or agricultural laborers in the workplace are not equivalent to that of many teachers and researchers in academia. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether there are threads that connect workers across these different worlds of work. The experience of withdrawing from the panel in solidarity with teacher workers of UK academia has taught us that these threads exist- the lives of adjuncts and tenured professors are interconnected as much as the lives of domestic workers and working women are connected or the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and workers in the fashion world in the US are connected. As Rogaly and Schling (2022) remind us when they quote David Featherstone, solidarity emerges through collective activity – by doing things together. This collection of short essays is the record of a moment of solidarity, of striking together in the world of work called academia.
“Developing an Instrument to Measure Autonomy: Urban Middle-Class Women in Delhi”
This article develops an instrument to measure women’s autonomy in India, specifically focusing on urban women from households that have access to economic resources. It points toward the importance of understanding and measuring the autonomy of women among India’s rapidly growing middle classes. The article develops two kinds of measures based on a primary survey of women in Delhi. First, a Relative Autonomy Index (RAI), which is an adaptation of the RAI developed by Ana Vaz et al. (2013, “Measuring Autonomy: Evidence from Bangladesh.” OPHI Working Papers 38a. Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Oxford University) that asks questions designed to understand specific characteristics and circumstances of life for middle-class women in North India. The second is an ambient measure that indexes important aspects of family, peer group, and resource use. The adapted RAI is then examined in relation to the ambient measure, as well as to measures of psychological well-being and self-efficacy, in addition to being tested for validity and reliability.
