Palashi Vaghela

Palashi Vaghela's Biography

I’m an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT). Prior to SFU, I was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. My theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches and teaching are informed by my training in computing and information science, science and technology studies (STS,) anthropology, as well as feminist, gender and sexuality studies. I review and contribute to Associated Computing Machinery (ACM) conferences like Human-Computer Interaction (CHI,) Designing Interactive Systems (DIS,) Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW,) and Fairness Accountability and Transparency (FAccT); and other venues like Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Society for the Social Studies of Science; Society for the History of Technology (SHOT); Annual Conference on South Asia, etc. My work has been funded by Microsoft Research, Social Science Research Council, Mellon Foundation, University of Siegen, among others. 

I integrate ethnography, historical analysis and design studies to understand socio-technical and cultural practices of communities and institutions/organizations with a focus on relationships of power and inequity in computing. I think a lot about what is considered normative and what is normalized in worlds of computing, including where it comes from and how it becomes common sense. To this end, I am often pursuing alternative understandings of computing that challenge or resist such norms. I am particularly interested in questions of labor, culture and value in the political economy of global computing where I am guided by historical, material and corporeal knowledge of marginalized communities to question as well as re-imagine worlds of computing. 

My current book project is an ethnography and historical analysis of caste and gender relations undergirding the political economy of the Indian computing industry. It has emerged from my work experience in the software industry as well as non-profits and startups focused on issues of gender and technology, and in research collaboration with anti-caste and Dalit communities with whom I have the privilege of organizing, theorizing and imagining anti-caste futures of technology.

Education

Current & Upcoming Courses