A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Kinjal Dave

Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

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Kinjal Dave (A/P/A Institute at NYU Visiting Academic and PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication) presents her dissertation chapter, “Bethak: Sitting Between Work and Life in the Diaspora” at this session of the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Dave’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Gujarati Aunties on the Integrated Circuit: Women’s Manufacturing Labor in 1980s New Jersey,” is framed by broad theoretical questions such as: how does the West relate to the non-West in empirical terms, particularly in the creation of a political world order following the Second World War (Williams 1976)? What are the symbolic relations which reflect a situation of postmodernity (Harvey 1989, Trouillot 1991)? The tradition of global communication studies has argued that ethnographic perspectives are valuable resources with which to understand the arrangement of symbols and meanings of globalization as a post-structural process (Kraidy & Murphy, eds. 2003). How do Gujarati American technical workers in military subcontracting help tell the story of globalization?

This meeting is open to all graduate students working in and around the field of A/P/A Studies. Lunch will be served.

Bethak: Sitting Between Work and Life in the Diaspora

This methods chapter employs the bethak as an ethnographic and to an extent autoethnographic vignette from which to begin to delineate stories about a diaspora and the gendered social construction of their labor at the intersection of wage labor and social reproduction labor theories (Federici). The chapter sits as part of a broader dissertation project engaging immigrants from the nation-state of India, specifically from the state of Gujarat, who came to the United States in the 1980s as unskilled workers and established themselves into the manufacturing industry.

Specifically, many ended up working in military subcontracting facilities in New Jersey. Engaging an ethnographic encounter at an interviewee’s home, a bethak constructed in a peri-urban New Jersey home and the community members visiting the bethak are impacted by several different binaries: the United States as a different geographic and political territory from India, men and women as subjects socialized by their nation states and its cultural histories, and home with its relation to work. Since the project engages the author’s own family and family network, the chapter explores methodological distinction between autoethnography and reflexivity in the feminist ethnographic practices. Further, the chapter attempts to make a case for of collecting “boring stories” particularly from women who are not socialized to understand their own work history as important or worthy of storytelling practices as a feminist method with which to build working class immigrant women’s history.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms and a lactation room available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Image courtesy Kinjal Dave.