SAN DIEGO (TIP): Lilly Irani, Associate Professor, UC San Diego has been honored with Outstanding Book Award by International Communication Association for her book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India.

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, New Media & Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other venues. She has a Ph.D. in Informatics from University of California, Irvine.

Her book is described as “A richly detailed, multi-year ethnography of the ways in which social entrepreneurship, design, and innovation work underscore national and global chains of value and power. The book marshals history and political economy around stories of everyday people who invested in impossible dreams that if they are more creative, they will achieve upward social mobility. Instead, innovation and human-centered design projects most benefited those already with social and economic capital. Precarious Indian citizens remained so despite their passionate aspirations. Deconstructing these rationalities and identities of entrepreneurialism in the context of development and governance in India, the book charts a new theoretical frame for understanding the entrepreneur as a figure of exploitation and a tool of nation-building. Dr. Irani asks critically “Who modernizes whom, and towards what horizon?” As such, the book de-Westernizes the figure of entrepreneur as a hero of teleological progress.”