Named after the Urdu word for revolution, Inquilab is a critical computing research lab located at the Human-Centered Design and Engineering Department of University of Washington.
Our current research focuses on the themes of race and migration, agriculture, and labor. Across these areas, we examine how state and market interests often come into conflict with individuals, communities, and social movements—especially through the lens of computation. We interrogate how computational logics are mobilized for subjugation, while also tracing possibilities—and at times co-designing tools—for subversion, appropriation, and refusal. These efforts are part of our broader commitment to imagining and building computing otherwise.
Our work is often rooted in place: we conduct research through ethnography in the Washington region and/or long-term partnerships with social movements both locally and beyond.
Inquilab is led by Sucheta Ghoshal. PhD student members of the lab include Lubna Razaq, Samuel So, Mckane Andrus, Joice Tang, Anoolia Gakhokidze, and Hanna Barakat.
This project critically investigates how computational systems—ranging from search engines to electronic ankle monitors—participate in the racialization of users by encoding and enacting assumptions about subjectivity. Centering the experiences of racially subjugated migrant populations, it explores how these groups encounter information technologies as extensions of the bureaucratic and carceral functions of the State. At the same time, the project analyzes the sociotechnical infrastructures through which State and industry actors co-produce the perceived omnipresence and authority of these systems. People: Lubna Razaq.
This project interrogates state and market investments in smart agriculture. In partnership with local movements in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, it examines how AI-based agricultural technologies often flatten culturally heterogeneous knowledge systems and farming expertise in the name of resource optimization. What drives these technosolutionist impulses—from cities or industries? And what possibilities exist for diasporic knowledge systems of food and farming to subvert or refuse such erasure? People: McKane Andrus and Hanna Barakat. Movement partner: The Silent Task Force. Funding: NSF S&CC: Smart & Connected Commun, AISL, 2310515.
Culture of techwork. In a recently completed project, we began with the provocation: How are labor relations and worker consciousness shifting within the tech industry in the wake of the 2022–23 economic rupture? We theorize this moment of disillusionment among the tech managerial class as the cruel optimism of tech work. People: Samuel So. Funding: NSF IIS-2327163. Media coverage: KUOW, Geekwire, The Daily.
Higher-ed organizing. This project examines how automation—often implemented by institutional interventions such as AI task forces—reshapes the workplace in higher education. We explore how certain skills are devalued, replaced, or reimagined, and what opportunities remain for organized higher-ed workers to push back. People: Joice Tang. Funding: Washington State Labor Research Grant, 2025-2026.
Data centers & cloud computing labor. Another project investigates data centers as sites where computational power is concentrated—a defining feature of the global tech landscape with well-documented ecological impacts. Our focus here is on labor entanglements: how labor sustains, resists, or redefines these infrastructures, and how these dynamics invite us to think more expansively about computing labor, opening up new possibilities for organized resistance. People: Anoolia Gakhokidze. Funding: Anoolia is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Check out a zine from this work: Chokepoints in the Cloud.
As an ongoing methodological exploration, this project aims to establish relational intimacy and allyship as a core method for responsible engineering and computing research. With this work, we contribute: a comprehensive understanding of how community-engaged researchers relate to their participants as they navigate competing commitments and responsibilities, a theory of community-centered methods for design and development that build upon the rhizomatic understanding of Relation, while simultaneously negotiating institutional support within the University of Washington toward community-engaged computing research across the university. People: Joice Tang. Funding: NSF S&CC, AISL 2310515, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering Endowed Fund for Excellence, and a gift from Google.
In an ongoing exploration of public scholarship from Inquilab, lab director Sucheta Ghoshal serves as the academic director of the critcal tech magazine Logic(s). Inquilab influence into Logic(s) results in critical tech scholarship that interrogates contemporary computing tools in their materiality while mapping out the social, political, economic, and historical entanglements. Funding: INCITE at Columbia University, private donors.
The Otherwise School was a global research initiative towards transnational solidarity and movement building. This project is a collaboration with black study and predictive policing scholar J. Khadijah Abdurahman. The Otherwise School aims to explore the questions: what would it take for us to build technologies of resistance in the face of an ongoing global crisis of fascism, capitalism, anti-blackness? How can we best locate technology in these intersecting forces of harm?
Joice Tang and Sucheta Ghoshal. 2025. Research and/as Relation: Documenting Experiences of Community-Collaborative Researchers in HCI. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 7, Article 470 (November 2025), 28 pages. [ACM DL (Open Access)] [Honorable mention]
McKane Andrus, Sucheta Ghoshal, and Sayamindu Dasgupta. 2025. From Data Activism to Activism in a Time of Data-Centrism: Affirming Epistemological Heterogeneity in Social Movements. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 2, Article CSCW013 (April 2025), 32 pages. [ACM DL (Open Access)] [Honorable mention]
Ridley Jones LeDoux, Charlotte P. Lee, Sucheta Ghoshal, and Mark Haselkorn. 2024. Concept of Operations as Epistemic Object: The Sociotechnical Design Roles of a Systems Engineering Document. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1, Article 34 (April 2024), 31 pages. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
Acey, Camille E, Siko Bouterse, Sucheta Ghoshal, Amanda Menking, Anasuya Sengupta, and Adele G Vrana. 2021. “Decolonizing the Internet by Decolonizing Ourselves: Challenging Epistemic Injustice through Feminist Practice.” Global Perspectives 2 (1): 21268. [UC Press]
Lubna Razaq and Sucheta Ghoshal. 2025. The Role of ICTs in the Maintenance and Reproduction of Digital Border Assemblages. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama,Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
Samuel So, Vannary Sou, Sean A. Munson, and Sucheta Ghoshal. 2025. The Cruel Optimism of Tech Work: Tech Workers’ Affective Attachments in the Aftermath of 2022-23 Tech Layoffs. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
Lubna Razaq and Sucheta Ghoshal. 2024. What to the Muslim is Internet search: Digital Borders as Barriers to Information Seeking. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17 pages. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
Sucheta Ghoshal and Sayamindu Dasgupta. 2023. Design Values in Action: Toward a Theory of Value Dilution. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2347–2361. [ACM DL (Open Access)] [Best paper]
Calvin Alan Liang, Emily Tseng, Akeiylah Dewitt, Yasmine Kotturi, Sucheta Ghoshal, Angela D. R. Smith, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Lauren Wilcox, and Sheena Erete. 2023. Surfacing Structural Barriers to Community-Collaborative Approaches in Human-Computer Interaction. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 542–546. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
Joice Tang, McKane Andrus, Samuel So, Udayan Tandon, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Vera Khovanskaya, Sean A. Munson, Mark Zachry, and Sucheta Ghoshal. 2023. Back to “Back to Labor” : Revisiting Political Economies of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 522–526. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Sucheta Ghoshal. 2021. Grieving in the face of fascism. Interactions 28, 6 (November - December 2021), 32–35. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Sucheta Ghoshal, Daniela Rosner, Alex Taylor, and Mikael Wiberg. 2021. (Un)making democracy. Interactions 28, 6 (November - December 2021), 6–7. [ACM DL (Open Access)]
Rollins, O. (2024, December 10). Psychopathic Imaging: Linking Brain Scans to Criminal Behavior with Oliver Rollins (S. Ghoshal, Interviewer) [Web]
Abdurahman, J. K., & Ghoshal, S. Letter from the Editor on Medicine and the Body in Tech. Logic(s) Magazine, 21.
Abdurahman, J.K. and Ghoshal, S. Policy: Seductions and Silences (editorial note). Logic(s), Issue 20.
Unmaking Democracy (2021), Interactions, 28(6), 6-7. (Guest Editor: Sucheta Ghoshal)