Mobility, Emplacement, Translation Available to Purchase

This chapter problematizes the myths of unfettered mobility and seamless communication promised by IT. Regimes of mobility/emplacement and translation/mistranslation configure business process outsourcing (BPO) agents’ constructions of futurity. The movement of the products of affective labor depends on the immobility and emplacement of BPO agents. Their mobility is at once physical, virtual, temporal, and social. They are also emplaced and rendered immobile due to their class, race, and national location. Agents experience immobility and “stuckedness” as entrapment, stagnancy, and fading hopes for their futures. The BPO industry depends on affective communication to produce value, even as inequalities produce mistranslations that disrupt agent-customer relations. Agents must engage in cultural, linguistic, and experiential translation to successfully perform their jobs. The industry itself is premised on inequalities and immobilities, from divergent valuations of racialized labor in the Global North and South to the inequalities of language in conjunction with the imperatives of racial capitalism.