Affective exits: leaving as desire against neoliberal futurity
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores the desire to leave a profession, and what this desire signifies about the conditions of work in the global economy. The setting for this research is the Indian information technology (IT) industry, an aspirational destination for millions of young people that is simultaneously experienced by IT workers as stressful, demanding, and unpredictable. As this article demonstrates, the desire to leave becomes an affective mechanism for grappling with the heightened sense of precarity that increasingly characterizes even relatively privileged forms of employment. Based on qualitative research conducted in the South Indian city of Chennai, this article pays particular attention to the experiences of women IT workers, drawing from their articulations of ‘heaviness’ to propose ‘weighted temporalities’ as a conceptual framework for drawing linkages between affect and time. By bringing the study of emotion into conversation with economic geography, this article frames the desire to leave as a form of future-making that allows workers to reconcile with, and even push back against, the uncertainties of neoliberal futurity.
Source: Social & Cultural Geography
Author: S. Shakthi
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4408315152