A/Synchronous Youth Work Subjectivities: A Feminist Hauntological Approach to Digital Futures

The concern with ‘future’ looms large in both youth studies and the growing scholarship on digitalisation of work. While youth studies scholarship has drawn attention to the impasse that youth face when promised futures (of economic liberalisation, structural adjustment programmes, or globalisation) fail to materialise, research on digitalisation of work highlights the persistence of ‘old’ social inequalities in impending work futures. This paper – based on my research with young women in Delhi, India, who work for e-commerce companies, and who experienced working from home for the first time during the Covid19 pandemic – brings these two disparate sets of literature together to think through when, where, what, and for whom are the digital futures of work in the Global South. The paper considers the temporalities of working-from-home and how these shape youth worker subjectivities. This ‘temporal turn’, the paper argues, is needed for disrupting the modernisation thesis that informs the conceptualisation of the relationship between work and technology, particularly in the Global South. Specifically, I borrow the concept of ‘hauntology’ to understand young people’s orientations towards work and technology as embedded in interlinked past, present, and future, and shaped by social structures. A feminist hauntological approach does so with particular attention to enduring structures of gender. Through feminist hauntological analysis of women’s narratives about work-from-home, I understand emerging worker subjectivities as ‘a/synchronous subjectivities’, which make visible the discrepancy between rapid advancement of digitalisation and workers’ embrace of digital cultures on the one hand, and infrastructural ‘lag’ and inequalities, and gender norms on the other hand.