Call for Chapter Proposals for an Edited Book

Digital Precarity and Speculative Narratives in the South Asian Context

Across South Asia, digital technologies have become central to the organization of labour, governance, mobility, communication, and everyday life. Yet the accelerated expansion of platform economies, algorithmic infrastructures, data extraction, and digital governance has simultaneously intensified conditions of vulnerability, dispossession, and unevenness. Celebratory narratives of “do good progress, individual empowerment, and democratization” increasingly obscure how digital systems consolidate wealth and influence while redistributing risk, instability, and precarity onto workers and users themselves (Precarity Lab, 2020).

Recent scholarship on digital culture, neoliberalism, and precarity has demonstrated that digital capitalism thrives through the flexibilization of labour, the extraction of affective and im/material labour, and the continuous externalization of social protections onto precarious populations. Terms such as “surveillance capitalism,” “platform capitalism,” and “control society” have been invoked to mark some of these economic and social transformations. Yet these formulations often risk universalizing technological transformations without adequately accounting for the differentiated histories of power through which digital modernity operates. Informed by Neo-Marxist, ecological, and new-materialist theoretical schemes, this volume proceeds from the premise that capitalist accumulation is inseparable from historically sedimented structures of domination, including caste, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and coloniality. Within the South Asian context, these dynamics take on particular urgency through the entanglements of postcolonial developmentalism, uneven infrastructural access, informal economies, caste hierarchies, urban fragmentation, and state-corporate regimes of digital governance. Rather than functioning as neutral instruments of modernization, digital technologies in South Asia emerge as contested terrains through which state power, corporate capital, necropolitics, and social hierarchies are continuously negotiated, resisted, and reconfigured.

The book is particularly interested in exploring how speculative cultural forms such as literature, cinema, streaming media, interactive fiction, graphic narratives, and online storytelling engage with emergent technological realities and uneven futures in South Asia. This edited volume seeks to critically intervene in contemporary debates on digital cultures by foregrounding South Asia as a crucial site for theorizing the relationship between the digital, precarity, and speculative imagination. Rather than approaching precarity merely as a condition of economic insecurity, the book understands digital precarity as a structural and affective condition produced through the entanglements of technological advancements, platform capitalism, neoliberal governance, datafication, infrastructural mediatization, colonial legacies, and asymmetrical regimes of in/visibility. Drawing upon critical traditions in contemporary theory, writing, and speculative narration, the volume asks how precarious digital futures are lived, mediated, embodied, and imagined across the region. Speculative narratives do not merely anticipate dystopian futures; they provide critical frameworks for interrogating the present by rendering visible the contradictions of digital modernity. Such narratives illuminate how technological systems intersect with caste, class, gender, sexuality, migration, religion, disability, and geography to produce differentiated experiences of vulnerability and belonging. This widening gyre of precarity is used to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated, despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The volume, therefore, seeks contributions that critically engage with how digital precarity emerges not as an accidental byproduct of technological transformation but as one of its constitutive conditions.

This edited book invites interdisciplinary contributions that aim to make a timely intervention in debates on digital capitalism by centering South Asia not merely as a site of extraction and experimentation, but as a critical locus for theorizing contemporary transformations of work, technology, and precarity.

Possible themes include (but are not limited to):

• Speculative imaginaries, technologically mediated futures, and the politics of representation
• Dystopian worlds, digital capitalism, and precarious labour
• Neoliberalism, piece-meal labour, and the embodied vulnerabilities
• Gig work, platform economies, and disposable workforce
• Algorithmic governance, surveillance, and dataveillance
• Tracking, quantified self, and datafied subjectivities
• Im/material labour, in/visibility, and differential inclusion
• Gendered, racial, caste-based, and queer experiences of digital precarity in South Asia
• Urban and spatial transformations, smart cities, and platform geographies
• Cinematic dystopias, speculation, and digital worlds
• Cybernetic subjectivities, bodies, and hybrid embodiment
• Do-It-Yourself culture, experimentation, and virulence
• Pedagogical and narrative counter-strategies
• Emotional, affective, and psychological dimensions of digital life
• Digital divides: access, literacy, and infrastructural inequality

Submission Guidelines: We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines and multimodal narratives, including cultural studies, literary criticism, anthropology, media studies, and related fields. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are encouraged. We are particularly interested in literary, cinematic, and creative representations of technological futures and alternative digital realities in the South Asian Context that illuminate the cultural, socio-political, and ethical implications of cutting-edge digital cultures and the politics of representation.

• Title and Abstract (350-500 words) of the proposed chapter to be sent at: digital.speculative@gmail.com
• A brief author biography of about 150 words should be submitted along with the chapter.
• Last date of abstract submission: 25th August, 2026
• Notification of acceptance by: 5th September, 2026
• Deadline for full-chapter submission: 15th January, 2027
• Accepted chapters should be approximately 5,000 – 7,000 words (including references)

Editors:

Dr. Isha Malhotra: isha.malhotra@smvdu.ac.in

Dr. Isha Malhotra is an Assistant Professor in the School of Languages and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Jammu & Kashmir, India. Her research interests include Cultural Studies with a specific focus on gender, neoliberalism, and biopolitics. Her research work engages with themes such as surrogacy and reproductive futurism in Indian literature, as well as biopolitical frameworks in contemporary narratives. She has published various research articles in reputable international journals such as International Journal of Cultural Studies, South Asian Review, Women’s Studies, Asian Women, CITY, Medical Humanities, and JIWS, among others, published by SAGE, Taylor & Francis, Routledge, and BMJ Group.

Dr. Chakshu Gupta: chakshugupta3899@gmail.com

Dr. Chakshu Gupta holds a PhD in English from the School of Languages and Literature, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, India. Her research interests include Cultural Studies, with a focus on Indian speculative fiction, posthumanism(s), and biopolitics. Her research examines Indian speculative fiction as a meta-generic mode of critical inquiry and cultural imagination, exploring its capacity to engage with the questions of technology, ecology, and contemporary socio-political gravitas. She has published various research articles in reputable international journals like CITY, South Asian Review, eTropic, Medical Humanities, and Women’s Studies.

Publisher: Taylor & Francis. Routledge Series.

Select References:

“Digital Precarity Manifesto,” Precarity Lab, Social Text 37(4 (141)): 77-93, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7794402

Technoprecarious. Precarity Lab, Goldsmiths Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781912685981 https://goldsmithspress.pubpub.org/pub/f2d657jk

Precarity within the Digital Age: Media Change and Social Insecurity, 2017. Edited by Birte Heidkamp and David Kergel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-17678-5

Om Prakash Dwivedi’s Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan: India, 2023. ISBN: 978-3031068195

The Speculative Route: Futures from South and Southwest Asia and North Africa. London: Routledge India, 2025. Edited by Merve Tabur and Sami Ahmad Khan.

Global Literature and the Digital. Routledge, July 2026. Edited by Tegan Schetrumpf, Aleks Wansbrough, Om Prakash Dwivedi [Forthcoming] https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003394860

Precarity in Culture: Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures. London: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023. Edited by Elisabetta Marino and Bootheina Majoul. eBook ISBN: 9781042868193

Phoebe V. Moore’s The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology, and What Counts. New York: Routledge, 2017. eBook ISBN: 9781315561523

Nick Bernards’s The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work. London: Routledge, 2018. eBook ISBN: 9780203730843