Deepa Kylasam Iyer

• Cornell University

With sustained work stoppages in several sectors amidst a presidential election, 2024 marked another important year for the U.S. labor movement. We are excited to release the fourth Labor Action Tracker Annual Report, in which we present key findings from our 2024 work stoppage data.

Book Review of 'The Economy of Algorithms: AI and the Rise of the Digital Minions' by Marek Kowalkiewicz. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2024. 240 pp. ISBN 9781529242461, $14.99 (paperback).

The online labour market is much less understood than traditional labour markets in terms of demand and supply of labour. In this context, this study explores how service occupations are distributed according to their employment share in online labour markets. Using decomposition analysis of the data from the online labour index database, we argue...

Book Review of 'The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy' by Lin Zhang. Columbia University Press, New York, 2023, 292 pp, USD 28.10 (paperback).

Book Review of 'Robots and immigrants: Who is stealing jobs?', by Kostas Maronitis and Denny Pencheva, Bristol: Bristol University Press. 2022. 156 pp., USD 45.95 (paperback) ISBN: 9781529212716.

Book Review of 'Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell workers’ fifteen-year fight for justice and a living wage', by Al Davidoff (2023). Ithaca and London: ILR Press. 238 pages, ISBN: 9781501771552

On the need for kindness in a crisis-ridden world.

In this report, we bring together data on strikes in 2022 across six countries – Brazil, Chile, China, Italy, Türkiye, and the United States – to advance our knowledge of strikes internationally and document innovative efforts of activists and scholars to overcome limitations in official data sources. While these six countries represent a fraction...

Book review of 'Data and Democracy, by Rogers Brishen, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2023; xi+275 pp., USD 50.00 (paperback).

This article examines how digital platforms focused on citizen engagement affect urban transformation based on multiple case studies from Bengaluru, India. The research question is: What type of initiatives and designs of digital citizen platforms enable co-production? Co-production is defined as the use of assets and resources between the public s...

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek (2023). New York: Verso, published in the Exertions section of the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

Book review of 'Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee', by Moten Crystal Mary. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2023. 256 pp. ISBN 9780826505583, $99.95 (hardcover); ISBN 9780826505576, $34.95 (paperback); 9780826505590, $19.99 (e-pub).

With the emergence of “hot labor summer” and an increase in the coverage of major work stoppages, 2023 marked an important year for the U.S. labor movement. We are excited to release the third Labor Action Tracker Annual Report, in which we present key findings from our 2023 work stoppage data. Since funding cuts by the Reagan administration in the...

Book Review of 'The bosses’ union: How employers organized to fight labor before the new deal', by Vilja Hulden (2023). Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 330 pages, ISBN:9780252086922

The objective of this study is to analyse the correlation between initial conditions and cross-country macroeconomic impact of Covid-19 on OECD economies. The study uses group-wise multivariate linear regression modelling to examine the link between macroeconomic variables of interest and the duration of the pandemic, severity of its impact, and an...

The author recounts an evening spent searching for James Joyce's Dublin

Contact centers have long been lead innovators in adopting new technologies to restructure jobs and manage workers. Between the 1990s and 2000s, the first wave of digitalization transformed what were then called ‘call centers’ through innovations in call volume tracking, automatic call distribution, and electronic monitoring and performance managem...

Book Review of 'The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy', edited by Angela B. Cornell and Mark Barenberg. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Book review of Johan Soderberg and Maxigas's 'Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking' (2022), published in the Exertions section of the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

Book Review of 'We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula'. By Phyllis Michael Wong. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2022. 196 pp. ISBN 9781611864205, $19.95 (paperback); ISBN 9781628954524, $19.95 (e-book).

Making Choices, Making Do: Survival Strategies of Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression by Lois Rita Helmbold (2022). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 247 Pages. ISBN: 9781978826434 The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Catalan Cities by Sarah Ifft Decker (2022). University Park, PA: Penn...

This article examines digital nomads and their search for freedom by taking the case of Chiang Mai, Thailand. The article argues that the idea of freedom from authority that is achieved through mobility and location independence is itself reflective of the digital nomad’s position in a system that privileges some with mobility while disallowing oth...

Book review of Trevor H. J. Marchand's 'The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England' (2021) published in the Exertions section of the Society for the Anthropology of Work

Book review of the edited volume 'The Many Futures of Work' published in the Exertions section of the Society for the Anthropology of Work

The covid-19 pandemic turned into a question of access to safety and security for millions worldwide. This study examines how the narratives of pandemic citizenship unfolded for India’s internal migrant workers who lost their livelihood and housing during the lockdown and were forced to return to their native villages. Using the framework of Legacy...

This study aims to understand the underlying structures and processes that make innovation ecosystems and classify them using a typological approach. A nested typology approach is used to classify innovation ecosystems based on two underlying dimensions, technology and organization. It brings out four types of innovation ecosystems namely focal, mo...

This chapter examines the impact of mega-events on social citizenship using the lens of critical urbanism. Mega-events are situated within neoliberal regimes of citizenship that are consumerist and entrepreneurial. These regimes exclude communities based on their purchasing power, and robs them of their political subjectivities and social citizensh...

This article examines how technopolitical response to covid-19 resulted in differentiated urban citizenship regimes in India’s smart cities. Using Isin and Ruppert’s framework, we argue that India’s digital citizens enacted their subjectivities in response to acts of calling, closing and opening in the cyberspace. Acts of calling encouraged citizen...

Zodiac is a collection of poems that evocatively portrays the journey of love and loss within the space-time of a year, traversing all seasons and zodiac signs. The book begins in the autumnal landscape of loss and heartbreak exploring how the winter of desolation gradually turns to healing and eventually gives way to the spring of hope and the sum...

Platform capitalism has enabled digital platforms to bring producers, consumers, and workers in a multisided marketplace with the purpose of collecting data. The resulting commodification of materiality and sociality in the digital sphere and the proprietary control of data open opportunities for value creation and realization, quite distinct from...

In this two-part series, we discuss problems specific to digital platforms in India and the type of regulatory framework required to ensure labor rights. In the first part, we flag three main structural problems Indian platform workers face. The second part explores the role of institutions in creating a regulatory framework for digital platforms s...

Letter to the EPW

The question of LGBT rights was first examined as part of gender and sexuality studies in the 1980s, predominantly in the United States. This was a result of the LGBT movement that had articulated the demand for equal rights and freedom of sexual and gender minorities a decade before. Since then, the examination of LGBT rights has traversed multipl...

The problem of migration is one of the most important for European society. Leading researchers from Russian and European universities participated in the preparation of the collective collection of articles. Various aspects of the migration crisis that emerged in the spring of 2020 due to the closure of national borders are considered. The publica...

This article examines how COVID-19 impacts migrant workers and what can be done for their equitable transition after the pandemic is subdued. The immediate policy response to the pandemic was closing of national borders that resulted in a state of emergency on a global scale. The need for continuous and safe passage of goods, services, and workers...

Automation impacts wage levels at the micro-level and the structure of employment at the macro-level. Job polarisation is defined as the automation of ‘middle-skilled’ jobs that require routine cognitive and manual applications, whilst high- and low-skilled occupations are preserved. This paper examines the nature of job polarisation in India durin...

The legalist approach taken so far with respect to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement has marginalised more radical possibilities of resistance by rendering diverse identities and intersectionality invisible. In this context, the historical examination of the LGBT movement in comparison with the civil rights movement and local case...

Transformative care policies have recently been debated at the ILO to meet SDG targets on employment generation and decent work, gender equality, and poverty reduction through state-funded social security policies. South Asia, which houses a large proportion of unpaid care work burden, is a region of special interest. The article explores how inves...

A former student recalls the generosity, vision and philosophical theses of lawyer and scholar Shamnad Basheer

Globally, increased investor interest in land is confronting various types of political mobilisations from communities at the grassroots level. This article examines the case study of a land occupation movement called Chengara struggle in the largest corporate plantation in southern India. The movement is led by the historically dispossessed schedu...

This essay examines how excluded categories of citizens enact, negotiate and bargain rights in the city through their everyday experiences. The different 'regimes of citizenship' in the city are theoretically characterized as the product of interaction between divisive governmentality of the state and active agency from the citizens. The study uses...

The Right to Education law (RTE) in India that mandates universal, free and compulsory elementary education to children between 6-14 years completes a decade in 2019. This paper evaluates the law based on its provisions of inclusion for various disadvantaged groups of children. The concept of inclusion is operationalised as variables of equality an...

This essay compares Gini Coefficient as an index of inequality vis-a-vis the Palma Ratio for data across 140 countries. The article examines the characteristics of inequality that historically led to the formulation of the Palma Ratio as a relevant measurement of inequality between countries through the articulation of the homogenous middle and the...

The fourth industrial revolution is upon us with systems of intelligence connecting the physical world to the virtual. One of the main impacts of this technological revolution is automation of jobs which has massive and urgent macro and micro level implications. 69% of jobs in formal employment in India would be automated with additional job losses...

Ethical approach to human rights conceives and evaluates law through the underlying value concerns. This paper examines human rights after the introduction of big data using an ethical approach to rights. First, the central value concerns such as equity, equality, sustainability and security are derived from the history of digital technological rev...

The anti-colonial movement in French India has invoked much less scholarly interest than that of British India. In French India, anti-colonial resistance came out through the trade union movement of handloom and textile workers under the leadership of V. Subbiah. Later, the trade union movement coalesced with students, women and peasants’ movements...

Social movements have changed their form and dynamics in the internet age. From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter in the US and Indignadas in Spain, discourses of social movements are created in cyberspace and enacted in urban spaces. In the global South, such ‘networked’ movements are changing our understanding of how political violence is ena...

This dissertation examines how land occupation movements by the historically disadvantaged communities in plantations in Kerala is questioning property regimes.

Child labour has persisted through many decades despite national and international legal frameworks of prohibition world over. In South Asia, this issue has been specially compounded by concerns of poor implementation and the linkage of debt bondage and intergenerational labor. This article examines the traditional systems of bonded child labour pr...

This article examines the potential of Commonwealth as an international organization from an institutional perspective. The author evaluates the potential for structural and procedural reform with the help of policy case studies on gender and sexual rights and trade negotiations.

This essay questions the assumption that cities and the processes of capitalism are inevitably intertwined by examining historical examples of non-capitalist cities. The essay uses examples from eastern European and Asian cities to understand why tracing the process of urban origin is important to understand the contemporary development of cities i...

This essay examines whether it is transaction or transition costs that impedes institutional change in developing countries. The essay argues that during the first stages of economic growth, informal institutions emerge to distribute net benefits to social classes to keep transition costs low. During the later stages of growth management, the empha...

This essay examines the role of politics in the development of economy using a historical approach. Using early developers and east Asian economies as illustrations, the essay argues that the state was powerful in setting the institutional structures for market to develop and function efficiently through prioritized and targeted policies.

The stated objective of land policy in India has shifted from redistribution through land reform to ownership through land acquisition in the period between 1950 and 2014. Sub-national governments that dealt with land policy had the option to exercise a mix of redistribution and acquisition based on historical factors, social demands and political...

Planning boards are autonomous institutions constituted at the sub-national level (called states) in India to aid and advise the government on preparing five year plans, annual plans and undertaking expert-based studies to examine the feasibility of plan projects at the local level. In addition to this, some planning boards are also entrusted with...

The presentation summarizes SAAPE Poverty Report 2016 and brings out the economic and political critiques of development models in South Asia.

Acid violence is embedded in larger macro political and economic structures that sustain gender domination and perpetuate new forms of gender inequality. This article argues that increasing incidences of acid violence in South Asia and especially in India would benefit from the structural analysis that takes into account impacts from socio-economic...

South Asia, as a region, comprises only 3.5 % of the world’s surface area, but houses 24.8% of the global population spread over eight countries- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It has people from hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups and at least seven major religious identities. Considering its size...

Classical economics works on the principle that individuals are rational and make decisions to maximize their self interest. However in real situations, individuals face a conflict between rational and irrational selves leading to decision making that does not leave them better off. Libertarian paternalism proposes a solution to this rationality pr...

The nature and role of the Indian state has changed with the opening of its economy to neo-liberal economic model in the 1990s. The Indian state was originally conceived as a transformative institution for remaking its highly unequal society more egalitarian as indicated by the Indian constitution. Post economic reforms, while the state has been fo...

The SAAPE 2016 Poverty Report is both a descriptive account of the resistance movements of South Asia and a critical examination of the structures and processes that created them. This is a narrative of people’s experience of what the multiple development trajectories and histories have been through the policies of states and their successive gover...

Summary of the first South Asia Thinkers' Workshop held in Colombo, Sri Lanka during 9-10 March, 2017. A wide range of issues plaguing development in South Asian region including land, labour, agrarian distress and gender questions were discussed.

The mind of a criminal works in very specific ways. A crime is a manifestation of the working of a criminal mind. Crime is therefore, a ‘trace’ of a criminal mind. During the planning of a criminal act, the mind of a criminal offender is subject to several types of logical fallacies like over generalization, tunnel vision and dichotomy of perspecti...

The Rajasthan Right to Hearing Act 2012 is one of the legislative measures that was brought in as a result of social movements of resistance in the Indian state of Rajasthan. The new legislation demanded better delivery of government services and the right of citizens to have transparency and accountability. This narrative essay dwells on the autho...

By being both suppressed and defiant, the women of the villages of Rajasthan display an ability to persevere and survive, and offer subversion in a tradition of resistance.

The paper discusses how political regimes evolve property regimes with special reference to Kerala, India. Kerala has given predominance to land reforms due to substantial grassroots politics. The main argument of the paper is that redistributive political regimes favour land reforms as an agenda while needs of private capital reverses it towards l...

The paper discusses a budget proposal to tax food items from branded restaurants in Kerala from a public health perspective. The authors argue that a portfolio of interventions to nudge consumer choices in diet and nutritional preference along with tax is likely to yield better results.

The lake systems in Bengaluru have transformed disjointedly with the urban sprawl as the city expanded predominantly due to its IT services. This paper traces the evolution of one lake system to examine the nature of lake as a property system in an urban context in India. Bellandur lake is part of Varthur lake series and is one of the highly pollut...

In Turning Thirty and Other Poems Deepa Kylasam Iyer becomes the story teller of outer landscapes as well as the inner mindscape that brim with rich effervescence. The outer and inner world mirror themselves in a way, countering and complementing each other. We meet minds wandering without bodies and forms searching for new meanings. The contested...

Road regulation, especially of National Highways in India, is done by administrative structures at the Union government level using legislation and policies. The legal framework in India alone has been found to be inadequate with reference to the issues of land records, boundary marking and citizen rights. What is legal becomes a matter of definiti...

Environmental discourse in India has always competed in the theatre of its democracy with the help of two powerful actors-the state with its agenda of development in technocratic environmental discourse and the indigenous population represented by civil society with a democratic environmental discourse. Conflicting binaries crowd out this space-dev...

The purpose of this paper is to understand the influence of policy environment on development of technology transfer in university industry linkage in India. This study reviews literature on design perspectives of university spin offs including large scale survey of Indian universities, cross national comparisons and analysis of documents from prof...

This paper attempts to study the components of shaming in the policy of Public Distribution System (PDS) in the India state of Tamil Nadu. Previous studies suggest that this state has been one of the better performing ones in implementing the PDS as a result of pro poor regime and mass political base. Yet components of shaming may remain in design...

Response to the consultation paper on internet neutrality and regulation of over-the-top services in India

Behaviourally Induced Governance (BIG) Ideas presented to Her Excellency, Lieutenant Governor Dr. Kiran Bedi, Puducherry, India that charts out an alternate vision for effective governance of the Union Territory.

The monograph examines the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel on making the Western Ghats eco sensitive zones in the light of Indian environment laws. The Indian environment debate of conservation and protection of biodiversity has been sustained by post colonial response that has two major opposing strands. The first is the...

The presentation argues the policy debate on plain packaging for tobacco products in India. While the motion of the debate supports state led interventionist approaches including plain packaging for public health, the opponents argue against such a policy option on grounds of consumer rights and other arguments.

The choice of one policy among potential policy options is a difficult one. A purely theoretical approach sets out a model of policy environment and categorises each policy option as a typology. This essay examines Direct Benefit Transfer policy in India and the way it has played out in India through a redistributive-regulatory typology approach.

The problems, policies and debates on the quality and access of research cannot be decoupled from higher education in an educational system like that of India where the impact of primary, secondary and higher education is sequential. The article traces the idea of education from the early Greek and Indian philosophers, the university tradition of I...

The city of Bangalore came up with a draft structural plan 2031 to accommodate the emerging challenges of urban growth, congestion and environmental concerns through planning and regulation. In the decade 2000-2010, when the city opened itself to the booming IT industry, its developmental response to the pressures of growth has been through policy...

Eco-industrial approach to urban planning views a component in the urban system in relation to others through spill over. IT Parks as a subsystem has a number of organic relations with the macro environment of local economy and ecology. The paper examines the case of one IT park as conceptualised as a self sufficient unit in the city of Bangalore a...

The paper sketches the history of environmentalism by tracing the contours of the post industrialised world. The pantheistic relationship between man and nature was seriously compromised and their interaction became complicated by increasing inequality and poverty of the working classes and the political repression of the colonies. New approaches a...

Domestic work has been an integral part of Indian economy for a long time now both as paid and unpaid care work. With a burgeoning middle class and increasing inequality, this sector has transformed into a readily available livelihood option for many women across India. This field of work is tied to migration to big cities, unqualified labour condi...

The dissertation examines the structural factors of political regimes that determine property regimes at sub-national regions in India. The study uses two variables to classify the type of property regime- bundle of rights distributed and access to resources and identity through property distribution. The data used are relevant land laws, case laws...

This paper examines the varying degree of success in land distribution policies in India by comparing the type of political regime in the respective states. The hypothesis is that the ideology (or lack thereof) of the ruling political party has a bearing on the success of land distribution. The methodological framework used is the typology of India...

This paper attempts to bring out the process of implementation of PESA Act through the case study of Niyamgiri. The various stakeholders in the case were, the Vedanta company, the Kondh tribe, civil society organisations, the Orissa government and the Union government. Their individual interests played out in the backdrop of the legal rights given...

Public value describes the value that an organization contributes to society. It is seen as the equivalent of shareholder value in public management. Public values are those providing normative consensus about (1) the rights, benefits, and prerogatives to which citizens should(and should not be) entitled; (2) the obligations of citizens to society,...

The paper examines the evolving role of gold in the light of the current gold rush in India despite the worsening financial crisis across the globe and aggressive inflationary conditions. Economically, gold is a lucrative investment that consistently provides high rate of returns, a hedge against inflation in the long term, a store of wealth, a med...

One of the major characteristics of economic underdevelopment is the presence of poverty that feeds on layers of inequality. Though it appears that India has made great strides in ensuring economic growth expressed through its Gross Domestic Product and increase in per capita consumption, it has been a growth story that benefitted only some at the...

Contemporary debates in India hinges on the Indian welfare state reneging on its welfare ideals with increasing openness of the economy. The paper examines this argument in the light of the definitions of welfare state as it originated in the West in the turn of the twentieth century. Western ideas on welfarism have never been fully applicable to t...

Pareto optimality is a concept in economics that deals with optimum condition of resource distribution. James Buchanan in his essay extended the idea into the political realm to understand how unanimous consensus is reached. This essay attempts to examine whether he was justified in using the assumptions discounting the Rule of Law angle.

The essay deals with the definition of inequality, the problems and principles of any inequality measurement. Then it goes on to understand various measurement indices of inequality, their comparative advantages and disadvantages. Finally, it seeks to understand the significance of having inequality measured and compared.

The paper briefly traces the common historical narrative to identify the way in which land and its resources were traditionally viewed and valued from the doctrine of public trust that regards men as trustees of land to the idea of common pool resources advocated by Elinor Ostrom. The paper then analyses the mineral wealth of India and the ways in...