Bullard Postdoctoral Fellow
Chelsea recently completed her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, where her research examined the role of data and digital technology as a battleground for transformational social change in the U.S. criminal legal system. Her dissertation, titled "Un-inventing Carceral Technology: Four Experiments in Imagining the World More Rigorously," draws from participatory action research and speculative design projects in order to interrogate the default assumptions underlying data-intensive systems and experiment with liberatory modes of computation. The ultimate goal of this work is to reconfigure the structural, interpersonal, and personal aspects of computation that sustain the demand for captivating/carceral technologies over time.
Doctor of Philosophy in Media, Arts, and Sciences; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Arts in Sociology; Stanford University|
Carceral Technologies
Abolition
Youth Justice
Co-design
Liberatory Technology Design
Barabas, Chelsea. 2023. "Care as (Re)Capture: Data Colonialism and Race during Times of Crisis." New Media & Society 146144482311659. doi: 10.1177/14614448231165902.
Barabas, Chelsea. 2022. "Refusal in Data Ethics: Re-Imagining the Code Beneath the Code of Computation in the Carceral State." Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 8(2). doi: 10.17351/ests2022.1233.
Barabas, Chelsea, Colin Doyle, Jb Rubinovitz, and Karthik Dinakar. 2020. "Studying up: Reorienting the Study of Algorithmic Fairness around Issues of Power." Pp. 16776 in Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Barcelona Spain: ACM.
Chelsea recently received an Honorable Mention for the Nicholas C. Mullins Prize for 2024 for "Refusal in Data Ethics: Re-Imagining the Code Beneath the Code of Computation in the Carceral State"