Jyothsna Belliappa
I have recently completed my PhD titled ‘Relational
Identities: Middle Class Indian Women Negotiate the Consequences of Globalization and Late Modernity’
under the supervision of Professor Stevi Jackson and
Professor the Baroness Haleh Afshar. My examiners were Professor the Lord Parekh and Dr Kaloski-Naylor.
The liberalization of India’s economy which commenced with economic reforms in 1991 saw several economic and cultural changes in urban India accompanied by a visible increase in job opportunities, particularly in the transnational Information Technology (IT) industry. Since the mid-nineties an increasing number of middle class women have joined the IT workforce, gaining access to incomes and lifestyles that their mothers had rarely imagined. My PhD research investigated how contemporary Indian women employed in the IT industry understand their experiences of these changes, concentrating on two sites of change: urban middle class families and transnational workplaces. It examined what women’s understandings of these changes may indicate about their sense of self. Through qualitative research conducted amongst women aged between 24 and 37 years in Bangalore, the birthplace of India’s IT industry, the research explored how women attempt to negotiate continuities and contradictions between in the home and the workplace and reinterpret ‘Western’ notions of individualism in the Indian context.
My thesis raises questions about the contradiction between the notion of work-life balance and the intensification of work in the knowledge economy which requires employees to be flexible, mobile and highly individualized. It attempts to critique the late modernity thesis, interrogating Giddens’s (1991) notion of the self as a reflexive project. By foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of middle class women, it aims to add a new dimension to contemporary scholarship on the Indian middle classes. I hope to take this research forward by comparing the experiences of urban middle class women in India with those of women in the Indian Diaspora in Britain, thereby exploring two facets of women’s experiences within globalization. I am also interested in focussing more sharply on call centres.
I have an MA in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. My previous experience includes teaching Sociology and Women's Studies at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I have also worked in qualitative research, managing projects for multinational corporations, NGOs and the United Nations.
However, none of my pervious experiences prepared me for the intensely exciting experience of being a student of CWS and relating feminist theory to everyday lived-experience (mine and those of my research participants).