10 – The Self-Improvement Boom: Of Aspiration, Affective Labor and South Asian Futures

‘Self-improvement’ is an idea that has mobilized a whole host of actors and agents in its wake in contemporary South Asia. From the expanding bookshelves under the ‘self-help’ category to private and government institutions offering coaching in technical and soft skills, there is a proliferation of discourses on skilling, self and professional development. Soft or interpersonal skills is the ubiquitous language that dominates the self-development discourse. The service sector is particularly invested in an already-improved skilled subject. Against a milieu of new spaces of employment and consumption, youth want to be professional and negotiate new modes of being and belonging as cities expand. But there is also rising unemployment and increasing socio-economic inequality. We are interested in the everyday practices and grammar of self-improvement, that is not restricted to employment. We explore the work on/of the self, understood as multisensorial, embodied and affective labor, through which individuals become employable, socially mobile and develop the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai, 2004). This panel brings together papers focusing on some of the following questions: how are the idioms of self-improvement understood by differently positioned actors in South Asia? What are the registers of self-improvement? What moral economies are tied to practices and imaginations of soft skills? What does the rhetoric of self-improvement do to urbanization and neoliberalism? How does the language of self-improvement (re)produce the politics of caste, labor, ethnicity and gender in its fold? Ultimately, what does the desire for self-improvement indicate for South Asian futures?

Convenors

Anne Kukuczka
- Suchismita Chattopadhyay -