The papers in this panel explore the strategies that urban Indians employ to exploit possibilities of upward mobility and forge new class identities in a rapidly changing socio-economic space. They ask: how are urban Indians undertaking projects of self-fashioning in a context where new forms of inequality are emerging? How do we make sense of the class anxieties that these projects often produce? And how do commodity producers and advertisers respond to new consumption practices and attempt to shape them? Starting from the assumption that Indians are actively negotiating modernity and globalization on their own terms, these papers investigate emerging strategies of consumption and production while situating them within existing cultural logics, traditions, and practices. To this end, these papers seek to understand the uniquely local ways in which Indians are negotiating the processes of liberalization and globalization.

Please email an abstract of the paper by March 25, 2009 to Melanie Dean (madean@sas.upenn.edu) or Llerena Searle (lsearle@sas.upenn.edu).

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Melanie Dean, Ph.D. candidate
Department of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
820 Williams Hall, 36th and Spruce Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19104