Jugaad Time

<div>In India the practice of <i>jugaad</i>-finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems-emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty discrimination and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In <i>Jugaad Time</i> Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate caste and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad-as both premodern and postdigital innovative and oppressive-Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.</div>