About

Akhil Gupta is a sociocultural anthropologist currently working on questions of transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption. He has been conducting research on call centers in India since 2009, with projects spanning from agriculture to state development agencies and multinational corporations. His research themes include contemporary capitalism, development, postcoloniality, globalization, and the state. Gupta's empirical work interrogates anthropological and social theory from its margins by focusing on the experiences of peasants and other groups of poor people in India. He combines cultural and sociological analyses of institutions and social life with questions raised by postcolonial theory, employing rigorous ethnographic research to rethink major questions in social theory related to space, place, and temporality. His approach emphasizes a deep understanding of specific places and peoples as a vantage point to critique and expand received ideas in social theory, with a sustained focus on rethinking and renewing anthropological methods.

Research topics

• Biology
• Bioinformatics
• Political Science
• Medicine
• Genetics
• Internal medicine
• Physiology
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Immunology

Selected publications

• CONSTRUCTION OF CEMENT CONCRETE PAVEMENT - A CASE STUDY

  Proceedings of the International Conference on Concrete Pavements · 2025-01-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The paper brings out highlights of execution of Cement Concrete Pavement including Management of Plants & Equipment, Materials, Manpower, Quality Control and overall Logistics. It also attempts to bring out some of critical observations that were made during execution and after opening of pavement to traffic. Some of the causes of failure / defects of Cement Concrete Pavements have also been identified.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Future of Futurity

  2025-02-28

  bookSenior author

  In The Future of Futurity, Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta examine the lives and experiences of call center agents in India’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, who live in Bengaluru and work for customers in the Global North. Mankekar and Gupta show how futurity—an affective-temporal potentiality and mode of being that emphasizes the unfolding of time—enables BPO workers to strive for hopeful futures despite their experiences of growing inequality, volatility, and violence. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with managers, owners, and workers of BPO companies, the authors explore how workers find pathways for navigating a globalized world and for imagining their futures in it. They point to the heterogeneous lives, yearnings, and anxieties of BPO workers, foregrounding the disjunctions and conjunctions between labor, corporeality, intimacy, family life, and mobility. Mankekar and Gupta show how workers’ daily lives and imaginings of the future point to the relationships between futurity, capital, and technology as well as futurity’s imbrications with contemporary racial capitalism. In so doing, the authors insist on the transformative potential of futurity even in conditions of extreme precarity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Futurity

  2025-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Futurity

  2025-02-26

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Discipline and Practice:

  2023-09-01 · 73 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anthropology

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-12-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  Presenting the broad spectrum of interdisciplinary academic research on corruption, this essential reference book examines anti-corruption legislation, governance mechanisms, international instruments, and other preventative measures intended to tackle corruption. Including over 100 entries and adopting a comprehensive approach to researching and combating corruption, this Encyclopedia covers the key ideas, concepts, and theories in corruption law.

  PublisherDOI

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  2023-09-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Eksistensi Ruko dan Relevansi Desainnya Dalam Perkembangan Bisnis di Kawasan Heritage, Gajah Mada, Denpasar

  Undagi Jurnal Ilmiah Jurusan Arsitektur Universitas Warmadewa · 2023-06-29

  articleOpen access

  Kawasan cagar budaya memberikan wawasan yang berkorelasi dengan nilai sejarah kawasan tersebut. Nilai sejarah mencirikan keunikan kawasan dan mempengaruhi perkembangan fisik kota secara umum. Peradaban masa lalu kota ini menjadi daya tarik utama. Perspektif pariwisata menawarkan perubahan paradigma dalam masyarakat dan pemikiran wisatawan. Kawasan cagar budaya Jalan Gajah Mada Denpasar merupakan cerminan kota kuno Denpasar saat ini. Kawasan Gajah Mada dikelilingi oleh bangunan tua yang berfungsi sebagai pertokoan. Rumah toko (ruko) di kawasan cagar budaya Gajah Mada sudah ada sejak tahun 1920-an dan mulai dibangun secara masif pada tahun 1970-an. Hingga saat ini, telah berdiri sekitar 312 ruko di sepanjang Jalan Gajah Mada, Jalan Sulawesi, dan Jalan Kartini. Dalam penelitian ini, melalui wawancara, observasi, dan analisis, diperoleh keberadaan dan relevansi ruko di sepanjang Jalan Gajah Mada, Jalan Sulawesi, dan Jalan Kartini. Penelitian ini mengambil 8 sampel untuk mengetahui bangunan yang dipilih yaitu berdasarkan lokasi (Jalan Gajah Mada, Jalan Sulawesi, Jalan Kartini), fungsi bangunan (makanan dan minuman, kedai kopi, toko kain, dll), dan jumlah lantai. (2 lantai, 3 lantai, dan 4 lantai).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Affective Sovereignties

  2022-12-19 · 12 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Decolonizing US anthropology

  American Anthropologist · 2022-09-27 · 89 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract After Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies. We propose that a reassessment of US anthropology might fruitfully begin with some counterfactual history. How would US anthropology been different had the founding generations conceptualized the discipline as a decolonizing project? What topics or themes might have become central to US anthropology? How might our methods have been different? To make anthropology departments more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, we need to do more than add faculty and students of color. Despite being a field whose central concept is “culture,” we have paid far too little attention to the culture of anthropology departments. Do unexamined practices of “white‐norming” that shape the everyday lives of faculty and students in anthropology departments persistently “Other”—marginalize and alienate—people of color?

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant K08MH087639

  NIH · $674k · 2014

Frequent coauthors

• Emeran A. Mayer

  University of California, Los Angeles

  236 shared

• Jennifer S. Labus

  University of California, Los Angeles

  168 shared

• Kirsten Tillisch

  122 shared

• Bruce D. Naliboff

  University of California, Los Angeles

  103 shared

• Tien S. Dong

  Center for Neurologic Study

  101 shared

• Lisa A. Kilpatrick

  University of California, Los Angeles

  98 shared

• Ravi R. Bhatt

  University of Southern California

  79 shared

• Jonathan P. Jacobs

  University of California, Los Angeles

  61 shared

Labs

• UCLA Department of AnthropologyPI

Education

• Ph.D., Engineering-Economic Systems

  Stanford University

  1988

• S.M., Mechanical Engineering

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1980

Awards & honors

• Visiting Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Soci…
• Visiting Professor, Danish Research School of Anthropology a…
• Goel Lecturer, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (20…