2025 Research Speaker Series
Sucheta Ghoshal
Assistant Professor, HCDE
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4
4:30 – 5:20 p.m.
Sieg Building, room 134
Beyond State & Market Imaginaries of Computation: Cultivating Computational Cultures Otherwise with Social Movements
Much of what we have come to know or name as computing technologies – from everyday productivity tools to generative AI – are typically shaped by the visions and priorities set by the state and the market. In other words, they are fundamentally invested in sustaining social and economic orders that consolidate power and capital, often at the expense of public interests. Within this configuration, racial subjugation is not an aberration but a structural precondition of computational cultures motivated by capitalist and imperial logics. What if we refused to accept this as the only possible technological order? What alternative possibilities of computing are revealed when we attend to the computational cultures of social movements that refuse, resist, subvert, or exceed the state and market imaginaries of technology? In this talk, I will share insights from my past and ongoing empirical, material, and theoretical engagements alongside individuals, communities, and social movements that actively resist computational regimes in the realms of migration, labor, and agriculture. Through case studies from each site of confrontation, I will offer new theoretical and methodological contributions: some that expose and explain the workings of the dominant computational order, and others that offer analytical frames for imagining and practicing computing otherwise.
About the presenter
Sucheta Ghoshal is an assistant professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) where she directs the research group Inquilab. She is interested in studying—and building—computational cultures that refuse, resist, subvert, or exceed the state and market imaginaries of computing. As a community organizer and researcher, she has worked across South Asia, the U.S. South, and now the U.S. Pacific Northwest, studying how computational technologies are used and appropriated to liberatory ends, tracing possibilities in computation for such subversion and appropriation, while co-designing tools of resistance in solidarity.
Dr. Ghoshal is an interdisciplinary researcher situated primarily in the field of critical computing. Her work follows two simultaneous lines of inquiry: critical technology analysis: examining the material compositions of artifacts, practices, and belief systems that enable (computational) technologies to enact race, gender, class, and caste-based dispossession; critical technology practice: tracing (computational) technologies forged in resistance to subjugation, as well as those rooted in rituals of joy, connection, desire, and life in the excess of violence and dispossession; co-designing tools of liberation in solidarity, when and where they’re needed.
Her current projects examine the formation of—and refusal/resistance to—computational regimes shaping the realms of migration, agriculture, and labor. Her work simultaneously investigates the physical and political architectures of computation itself, from sprawling data centers to the broader tech industry that underwrites them. She also serves as the Academic Director at Logic(s)—a queer Black and Asian tech magazine and digital/print platform that centers the imaginative potential of those most affected by technology but frequently excluded from the mainstream tech narratives. Her work has received recognition and awards at several human-computer interaction conferences (namely, DIS and CSCW). Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, INCITE at Columbia University, and private donors.
Ghoshal previously worked as a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she developed language and editing tools for Wikipedia and related projects.
The HCDE Research Speaker Series is hosted Thursdays in Autumn Quarter by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Presentations are open to the public.