Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign, temporary IT workers, and the unpaid labor of their spouses, to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees and their families face significant migration and visa constraints. In this talk based on her Seattle-based ethnographic research, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate family obligations, career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States.

Amy Bhatt is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration (University of Washington Press, 2018), co-author of the book Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington Press, 2013), the former oral historian for the South Asian Oral History Project, and the co-chair of the South Asian American Digital Archive’s Academic Council.