Associate Professor of Anthropology and South Asia Center affiliate Sareeta Amrute has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) 2019 book award in the social sciences for her book Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin.
Professor Amrute has also received the The Diana Forsythe Prize from the American Anthropological Association for the book.
Read comments on the book from ICAS below.
Sareeta Amrute’s rich ethnography skilfully decodes the entanglement of race and class that is embedded within global flows of labour and inflected onto bodies of Indian IT migrant workers in Berlin. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and printed sources of data that tread across the private and public lives of these workers, her analysis adeptly exposes the contradiction between the inferior position of Indian IT workers within Germany’s racial hierarchy and their highly-educated, middle-class economic status. Her exceptional work contributes to a wide range of scholarship by creating theoretical spaces for re-thinking complex processes of negotiation and resistance within neoliberal capitalism.