Hi, I’m Palashi!
I’m an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair for Technological Inclusion in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Prior to this, I was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
Working at the intersection of Information Science, Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Studies, I study how socio-technical and cultural practices of communities and institutions/organizations shape, and are shaped by, 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 guided by historical, material and corporeal knowledge of marginalized communities to question as well as re-imagine worlds of technology.
💡 Critical and Interpretive Studies of Technology
👩🏽💻 Human-Computer Interaction
🤳🏽 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
⚖️ Technology, Justice and Equity
You can contact me at pvaghela <at> sfu <dot> ca
(Picture of a person of South Asian heritage, medium dark brown hair and olive medium brown skin tone standing in a forest with a tote bag and a blue jacket in hand)
Updates
- March 2025: I was awarded the Canada Research Chair position for Technological Change for Inclusion (2025-2030.)
- June 2024: Our piece on Anti-Caste Lessons for Computing is out now in ACM XRDS
- May 2023: I will be joining the Communications Department at UC San Diego in August 2023 as University of California's President’s Postdoctoral Fellow!
Talks, Panels and Travel
April 2025 - Sharing my work and it’s relationship with contemporary interpretation of Ambedkar’s philosophy at the University of San Diego with Prof. Shailaja Paik
March 2025 - Guest Lecture for the course "Decentering Computer Science” at Yale University
July 2024 - In Chile, co-organizing and presenting my work at the panel “Unsettling the Nation-State” at the Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Technology
January 2024: Presenting my work at the Colloquium of the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine.
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