On 24th April, 2024, the Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH) hosted Dr Predrag Lazetic who is based in the Department of Education, University of Bath. Dr Lazetic spoke at length about his proposed project, ‘Youth in the Global Workplace: Towards the New Decolonial Global Agenda’. The lecture was chaired by Prof. M. Romesh Singh. He explained the connection between higher education as is perceived in Europe. He pointed out that studies by the UN and ILO have found that over 90% youth reside in the global South comprising South Asia, South East Asia, Africa, and South America and are facing extremely low employment and job growth. A majority of this research have been conducted in the global North using concepts such as the post-industrialization precarity, liminality, and delayed entry into the zone of adulthood.
Further, He discussed the new goal of global capitalism, the decline in global salaries, the availability of cheap labour, particularly in the global south, and exploitation in the labour process itself. He brought up the issue of displacement of jobs from the Global North to the Global South and the enormous research vacuum dominated by deindustrialization studies. Additionally, he discussed how young people’s subjectivities, situations, and material experiences are shaped by fragmented forms of globalization. Finally, he brought up the issue of a lack of South-South cooperation in the research of the global south. In this regard, he discussed a range of new theories and theorists such as the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura De Sousa’s work which highlights the epistemic inequalities in the knowledge production of reading the Global South especially from Global North scholars.
The project he aims to carry out is based on multi-sited ethnographic research into the lives of young people and how they related with the current scenario of shifting jobs and global workspaces. Amongst the sites that he intends to do his research in, he presented his intentions of looking into Hyderabad’s IT Sector workers, mall workers, App Cabs and influencers as a means of looking into current notions of globalization. Indian home hierarchies, duties, and kinship patterns in addition to different lifestyles. He also discussed his specific research objectives and agenda during his presentation, with an emphasis on the material circumstances of people’s jobs.
The summary of the guest lecture was compiled by Mr. Ankit Sen (IMA Anthropology)