The event will be held in hybrid mode at CPR Delhi & Zoom

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About the talk:

Where does labour organising take place? In the factory? Among workers? On streets? Scholarship on labour organising and its strategies in the Indian context often treats geography as a setting or stage on which political action unfolds. This is even though the materiality of the city, particularly the location of the factory and of workers’ residences within a neighbourhood, is crucial to how organising takes place. This talk foregrounds the city as a site and actor in labour organising, examining how workers’ changing relationship with the city shapes their capacity and willingness to organise.

Drawing on interviews with former garment women workers and union organisers of the Bengaluru-based Garment and Textile Workers’ Union (GATWU), the talk charts a history of organising in the export-oriented garment sector in the first two decades of the 21^st century in Bengaluru. It pays special attention to the neighbourhood strategies deployed by the union and the city-wide civil society networks it drew upon. The broader motivation for the talk is to explore how histories of urban and labour can be written together. In doing so, it recalls earlier work by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (2010) and Chitra Joshi (2005) but extends it further to ask how gendered precarities of work in a neoliberal city and in the time of footloose capital shape labour action.

Speaker:

Dr. Swathi Shivanand is an interdisciplinary historian with research interests in post-independence development trajectories of contemporary India, with specific focus on gender, labour, urban and the region.

Her most recent work has been collaborative and public-facing. In 2025, she worked alongside Garment and Textile Workers’ Union on the creation of an open-access archival website of one of Bengaluru’s garment worker unions. She has also co-curated an exhibition ‘Stitching Lives: Garment Work and Activism in Bengaluru’ which has had three shows in various parts of Bengaluru. She is currently Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at Manipal Institute of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at MAHE Bengaluru and a co-founder of Khidki Collective, a public humanities initiative which focusses on the Deccan region, its histories, cultures and politics.

Before joining academia, Swathi worked with reputed civil society organisations such as the Alternative Law Forum, policy think-tanks such as Centre for Policy Research and Indian Institute of Human Settlements and newspaper organisations such as The Hindu. She has a PhD in Modern Indian History from the Centre for Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This is the one hundred and ninty ninth (199) in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, and Centre for Policy Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on the city’s development issues and address all its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society, and politics. For further information, please contact: Champaka Rajagopal at champaka@cprindia.org or Partha Mukhopadhyay at partha@cprindia.org.