Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin

by Sareeta Amrute

In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders' cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.

Genres: Anthropology

280 pages, Hardcover

First published August 12, 2016

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good ethnographic analysis of cognitive labor and migration. Important reading for anyone working on contemporary labor; probably accessible for advanced undergrads (although some of the autonomous Marxist theory gets a little complicated for those not well-versed in political economic theory).

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated the nuance of this book and it’s insight into the accordances of ethnographic studies of coding worlds

[Sagarika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick read, I enjoyed it. The postracism threw me tf off!!!