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

October 1, 2025
1:45 pm
Theatersaal
‘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

Presentations

“Radical Interdependence” in the City: On the spatial conditions of navigating queer and trans embodiments in Hyderabad (India)
Binder Stefan - Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
The making of moral futures among psychotherapeutic trainees in India
Roy Meghna - Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Self-Improvement in Post-Liberalization India: Cultivating Agency and Optimism through Self-Help Content on Social Media
Pandey Siddhi - Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Indiav
Reframing Self-improvement: Gig Economy and Collectivization in Delhi NCR
Mazumdar Anurag - OP Jindal Global University, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India
“32 qualities like a Kumari”: Young women, skills training and work on the self in Kathmandu, Nepal
Kukuczka Anne - Institute of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Breaking Free – Hip Hop, Youth, and the Politics of Personality Development in a remote Himalayan Town
Gerold Nikolaus - School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
From Self-Help to Svapuruṣārth. Purposes and Production of Hindi advice books in the early 20th century
Freier Monika - Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Skilling the Self: Personality Development in a Globalised Delhi
Chattopadhyay Suchismita - BML Munjal University, BML Munjal University, Gurgaon, India
An Aversion to Progress: the cultural habitus of north Indian caste-histories
Baul Deepasri - History Department, College of Liberal Arts and 0Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Urbana, United States