Aneesh Aneesh
A. Aneesh is a sociologist of globalization, labor, and technology. He is executive director of the School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon and a professor of global studies and sociology. Previously, he served as a professor of sociology and director of the Institute of World Affairs and the global studies program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In the early 2000s, he taught in the science and technology program at Stanford University and formulated a theory of algocracy, distinguishing it from bureaucratic, market, and surveillance-based governance systems, pioneering the field of algorithmic governance in the social sciences. Author of Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Duke 2006) and Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global (Duke 2015), Aneesh is currently completing a manuscript on the rise of what he calls modular citizenship.
Address: Friendly Hall, University of Oregon
Address: Friendly Hall, University of Oregon
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Books by Aneesh Aneesh
Special Issue of the Journal Science, Technology and Society on the topic of Global Assemblages of Technoscience. Volume 22, Issue 1, March 2017
To access it, please follow this link:
https://www.karlpolanyicenter.org/borocz-anniversary
Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory, and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India—in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida—and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration with “body shopping,” the more familiar practice of physically bringing programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.
Papers by Aneesh Aneesh
Special Issue of the Journal Science, Technology and Society on the topic of Global Assemblages of Technoscience. Volume 22, Issue 1, March 2017
To access it, please follow this link:
https://www.karlpolanyicenter.org/borocz-anniversary
Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory, and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India—in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida—and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration with “body shopping,” the more familiar practice of physically bringing programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.
The United States has one big advantage where it still towers over the rest: its world-beating universities. The days of U.S. supremacy in manufacturing are gone, although we still are competitive in certain areas connected to our research universities. Yet when the world is “free to choose,” to paraphrase the late iconic conservative University of Chicago economist, they “choose” the U.S. for education and research.
In fact, this is my story. From an administrative background in India I came to study in the U.S.’s top public universities. Having earned my doctorate at Rutgers, I joined the faculty at Stanford and eventually came to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My family found Milwaukee a tolerant, welcoming community and stayed.
Creative industries and innovation are the way forward for the United States, and our universities give us a big leg up. Our most prosperous, dynamic regions are those linked to this country’s research universities. These areas, in turn, are the incubators for technologies that then disperse to the country as a whole.
But here’s the thing: Innovation is complicated. Historically, some politicians have distrusted innovation. Before the 1930s, Germany had the world’s leading universities, but the Germans chased off much of their talent (Jews, who in their minds were synonymous with liberals and communists). Germany’s universities never fully recovered. Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev lamented free-thinkers (especially in the arts and literature) resident in Soviet universities. He tried to make Soviet universities merely technical schools. This experiment predictably failed as it killed the spirit of innovation. Mao’s China demanded professors toe the “correct” ideological line and had students place dunce caps on professors. This certainly made a few bullies feel empowered, but China lost 20 years of development for this “feel-good exercise.”
Wisconsin is nothing like the above, fortunately, but political interventions in higher education always end badly, and we should be cautious.
Today, our chief industrial competitors, such as China, have recognized that the missing element in their economies is true innovation. Ironically, they are now trying to build what the U.S. already has, but is under attack. They are striving to radically expand the liberal arts. They realize that real innovation can only occur with culturally rich free-thinking individuals and are now investing to create such environments in the hopes this will lead to making the next generation of companies such as Apple or Google.
Recently, my own university has come under scrutiny by some in the Republican Party for being too liberal. On one level, this is a mischaracterization. At the geographic core of our campus sits the Lubar School of Business. By contrast, there is no Center for Marxist Studies. Furthermore, at the gateway to our campus, there will be the new Center for Entrepreneurship. By contrast, there is no Center for State-Planned Economies. There also are zero leftists in our business school and department of economics, where some of our highest-paid professors reside.
Most Americans say they think of scientists as neither politically liberal nor conservative, according to a Pew Research poll. But let’s assume for a moment that American scientists lean liberal. The fact that they do is their choice. We should not feel threatened by this.
Universities are overwhelmingly sites of free inquiry. Sometimes, however, there are voices from both the hard left and hard right who assert they have the right to suppress the voices of others in order to achieve some greater good. This seems to reflect a personality type rather than any left or right philosophical preference. The hard right curtails free speech through the power of the purse: funding. There is a cultural left of sorts that seeks to suppress speech through shaming. Both should be rejected.
Real innovation requires tolerating all speech that is not an incitement to violence. Will there be excesses in the process? Of course. But, ultimately, the marketplace of ideas will prevail and bad ideas will be rejected.
Innovation and free-thought are both wonderful and messy. The UW System embodies the best of these traits. Cultivating them further, rather than suppressing them, will attract talent to our fine state and deliver the prosperity that Wisconsin deserves.
To Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and other conservatives wishing to speak at UWM, we say “come on down.” This year, we hosted Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Contact a student group and have them sponsor your talk at UWM.
A. Aneesh is professor of global studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Aneesh Aneesh
▼ “Global Citizenship,” talk by Aneesh Aneesh, director of the Institute of World Affairs, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
▼ 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13
▼ James A. Little Theater, 1060 Cerrillos Road
▼ Free for SAR members, $10 general public, www.sarweb.org
Aneesh introduces his latest topic of investigation: how the governments of countries that export a global workforce have created new forms of citizenship for nationals who will spend their prime years working abroad.
Posted: Friday, October 7, 2016 5:00 am
Casey Sanchez
Aneesh Aneesh looks at how globalization is practiced rather than how it is preached. Using India and its diaspora of migrants as his laboratory, the associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Wisconsin and director of the school’s Institute of World Affairs has mapped out the ways in which the worldwide workplace increasingly requires individuals to cut their ties to local cultures and acquire what he defines as an “indifference to difference.”
His 2006 book Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Duke University Press) examines how the financial success of American software companies, debt-collection agencies, and even mortgage firms relies on the “virtual migration” of India-based coders, whose skills and labor cross national boundaries while their bodies remain in their home country. His most recent book, Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global (Duke University Press, 2015), finds him undercover at a call center in Gurgaon, India, observing the ways employees in the globally integrated marketplace learn to mimic American social norms and accents as they become increasingly disconnected from their own time zones and linguistic communities.
When Aneesh appears in Santa Fe on Thursday, Oct. 13, at the James A. Little Theater as part of the School for Advanced Research’s public lecture series, he introduces his latest topic of investigation: how the governments of countries that export a global workforce — such as India and Jamaica — have created new forms of citizenship for nationals who will spend their prime years working abroad. A former SAR fellow, Aneesh developed some of his theories on alternative citizenship during his sabbatical in Santa Fe.
“I call it the strength of weak citizenship,” Aneesh told Pasatiempo. “Something subtle is happening in the regime of citizenship. Different countries are beginning to offer different ‘packages’ of citizenship rights to their workers who live abroad and, sometimes, to immigrant workers within their nation-state.” With the rise of national governments recognizing residents who have dual and even multiple citizenships, Aneesh argues, the long-standing norms of citizenship as a function of biological heritage or territorial birthplace are beginning to loosen.
For his case study, Aneesh turns his attention to India’s recently established Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) law. Enacted in 2006, the law provides a package of citizenship-like rights to persons of Indian origin (through their parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents) who live abroad but have returned to India for some length of time. Under OCI, persons of Indian origin can travel to India without a visa, buy and sell Indian property, and compete with Indian residents for jobs. It is not, however, a dual citizenship arrangement that permits a person of Indian origin who is living in, say, London or Las Vegas, the right to vote or run for office.
Aneesh, who conducted several ethnographic interviews with high-ranking officials from the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, said that ethnic origin claims — “the sun never sets on the Indian diaspora,” according to one of the ministry’s reports — were invoked when the government first began drafting the OCI law.
Yet as with many countries that have reluctantly begun to extend citizenship-like rights to diasporas working abroad, what prompted India to act was money. Realizing the financial benefits the country could accrue by extending rights of commerce and travel to the estimated 20 million Indians who live outside India, the country enacted OCI to boost foreign remittance monies being sent back home.
While Aneesh endorses this new form of “weak citizenship,” offered by India as a step toward a stronger set of post-national citizenship rights, he is concerned that such laws can be easily abused. Citing Russia as an example, he notes that most former Soviet republics — such as Lithuania and Georgia — offer visa-free rights to enter Russia, but former citizens are excluded from the right to work or permanently reside there.
Aneesh’s fear of discrimination is reinforced at the border level, which for many nations in Europe and North America has become a heated site for upholding exclusive claims to national citizenship. “With the rise of the nation-state, borders become more important than city centers in defining citizenship, in demarcating who belongs to the nation-state,” Aneesh said. In his 2016 essay “Differentiating Citizenship,” he uses the metaphor of a soft fruit with a hard shell to describe that relationship. The “soft” interior of a country offers increasing protections to immigrants who work and live within its confines, he writes. But at the “hard-shelled” border, surveillance, raids, and an often-violent culture of militarized border patrols rule the day. Nonetheless, Aneesh hopes that emerging laws regulating rights for a country’s working diaspora may lay the groundwork for a future of worldwide post-national citizenship.
Historically, nations assign citizenship either by the right of blood ( jus sanguinis) or by the right of soil ( jus soli). For instance, the United States operates under jus soli, conferring automatic birthright citizenship on every child born on American soil, even if the parents are not residents of the U.S. Germany, in contrast, has traditionally allocated citizenship under jus sanguinis, extending citizenship to any child with at least one German parent, regardless of where he or she is born or raised. Aneesh argues that neither option is adequate to deal with this new era of mass immigration and globalized workplaces. “By adopting, extending, and enforcing the rights-based citizenship model,” he writes, “the states may be mere brokers of the late modern force of history where everything solid — blood or soil — melts into air.” ◀