Sucheta Ghoshal is an assistant professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). 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.
Sucheta is an interdisciplinary researcher and activist 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
Sucheta received her PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2020. Her dissertation proposed a southern praxis of technology, grounded in ethnographic research and shaped through design and activism with the Southern Movement Assembly, a regional movement rooted in the U.S. South. In her work, “the South” emerges not merely as a place, but as a cultural, epistemological, and relational orientation—one that cultivates transnational solidarities beyond geography. Within this framework, the Black U.S. South is understood as part of the global South, and global South “as a set of moving peripheries.” Alongside contributions to the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Social/Critical Informatics, the project also offers a portrait of a movement. At a time when digital technologies are shaped by extractive logics and activism often fragmented, this work poses the question: What might a transnational praxis of technology look like—one that reimagines the South beyond imperial and capitalistic ambitions?
Sucheta founded the research group Inquilab in 2021. 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 data centers to the broader tech industry that underwrites them. She also serves as the Academic Director of 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.
Sucheta previously worked as a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she developed language and editing tools for Wikipedia and related projects.