Biography

Studies focussing on the historical analysis of labour in the global North require subjective reflections and reversal of location for a comprehensive understanding and comparison of the development of capitalism in the global South. I am studying the labour history, production regimes, and automobile industry of mid-20th and 21st-century India. I will be tracing the differences in the modes of production, modes of control, violence, resistance, and working lives in industrialized countries from those of the countries in the global South, particularly India. My methodological interests are labour historiography, economic history, and archival research. My academic focus stems from three years of involvement with labourers in the Gurugram-Manesar-Faridabad automotive region and my multidisciplinary study of labouring lives at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). I am locating the ‘labour question historically’ and ‘regimes of production’ in the mid-twentieth (since the start of the auto-component manufacturing industry) and the twenty-first-century automobile industry in India. I am comprehensively mapping out the changes in class formation, [dominant] mode of production, working-class resistance movements, feminization, and state-capital-labour relations. Such a comprehensive historical account of the auto-sector workers is absent in the existing labour historiography. Although the concerns of the working class in the global South are increasingly becoming globally reflected in the scholarship, the labour history of the Indian automobile sector requires a clear distinction in location, temporalities, and concerns.

Previous Education

Jawaharlal Nehru University Development and Labour Studies 2022
Christ University, Bangalore Economics (Honours) 2020

Links

http://www.ankitkumarsingh.com