[Air-L] virtual reading group with Lilly Irani - next Friday - 1-2 EST

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,

In a week, CaMP anthropology will be hosting a virtual reading group meeting

with Lilly Irani.  We will be  discussing her new

book /Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in India./

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The meeting will be 1-2 pm EST on Friday, October 25th and can be

reached by clicking on this Zoom link:

https://iu.zoom.us/j/600280670

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An interview with Lilly can be found here:

https://campanthropology.org/2019/05/15/lilly-irani-chasing-innovation/ 
<https://campanthropology.org/2019/03/04/eitan-wilf-creativity-on-demand/>

We are reading chapter 4, which can be found here:


<https://www.dropbox.com/s/u6hwwufn6qk1hlc/Wilf%20-creativity%20on%20demand.Introduction%20and%20chapters%201%20and%205.pdf?dl=0> 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gq37ia1clbjpjtn/irani.chasing.innovation.ch.4.pdf?dl=0 
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/gq37ia1clbjpjtn/irani.chasing.innovation.ch.4.pdf?dl=0> 



<https://iu.zoom.us/j/600280670>

Looking forward to seeing you all virtually,

Ilana



The press blurb for the book:
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative 
freedom, all while generating economic value? In /Chasing Innovation/, 
Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, 
and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to 
innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in 
India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of 
development through design has come to shape state policy, economic 
investment, and the middle class in one of the world’s fastest-growing 
nations.

Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer 
and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani 
vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional 
design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one 
billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of 
entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to 
lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, 
and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and 
which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani 
warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit 
citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to 
generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social 
change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames 
others*—*craftspeople, workers, and activists*—*as of lower value, or 
even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development.

With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, /Chasing 
Innovation/ lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, 
caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a 
world where good ideas supposedly rule all.