Megh Marathe
Assistant Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Megh Marathe's research seeks to foster inclusion in expert practices and technologies by centering the perspectives of marginalized people.
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Biography
Megh Marathe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Information (ComArtSci) and the Center for Bioethics & Social Justice (College of Human Medicine). Their research seeks to foster inclusion in expert practices and technologies by centering the perspectives of marginalized people. They do this by studying the experiences and practices of multiple stakeholders -- doctors and patients, citizens and civic officials -- that is, laypeople and professionals, people who are marginalized as well as those in powerful positions, to generate critical theory and practical interventions for inclusive practice and technology design. Marathe adopts an ethnographic approach that is inflected by their computer science training and software industry experience.
Marathe’s interests are in science and technology studies, information studies, and medical anthropology. They are currently examining the social implications of therapeutic brain implants and the inclusion of gender-diverse people in data systems (and the lack thereof), in addition to developing their research on epilepsy diagnosis and treatment.
Marathe's work has been published in prestigious information and social science venues including Transactions of the ACM in Human-Computer Interaction (TOCHI), Medical Anthropology Quarterly, PACM-HCI (CSCW), CHI, Time & Society, and ICTD, winning a CHI Best Paper Award. They received a PhD in information from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in computer science from the University of Toronto, and a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Mumbai. Prior to MSU, Marathe was President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
Industry Expertise (2)
Research
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (3)
Medical Anthropology
Disability Studies
Science and Technology Studies
Accomplishments (3)
University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (professional)
2021
Outstanding PhD Student Award (professional)
2020 University of Michigan (UM) School of Information
Richard & Lillian Ives Fellowship (professional)
2020 UM Institute for the Humanities
Education (3)
University of Michigan: Ph.D., Information 2021
University of Toronto: M.S., Computer Science 2009
University of Mumbai: B.E., Computer Engineering 2007
Affiliations (3)
- Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S)
- Society for Disability Studies
- ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)
Links (4)
News (2)
Online microaggressions strongly impact disabled users
Cornell Chronicle online
2022-10-27
Additionally, social media platforms can amplify microaggressions, potentially spreading misinformation. “We’re very concerned about how it’s shaping the way the broader audience thinks about disability and disabled people,” said co-author Megh Marathe, assistant professor of media, information, bioethics, and social justice at Michigan State University.
7 new faculty bring expertise in DEI research, teaching to ComArtSci
MSU Today online
2022-10-19
Adding to the Department of Media and Information are assistant professor Megh Marathe and associate professor Celeste Campos-Castillo. Marathe specializes in inclusion in technology and society; intersectional analyses of disabled, queer, transgender and gender-diverse people’s experiences; epilepsy; public grievance redress; social theory; and informing expert practice and technologies. Campos-Castillo, who will begin with the college January 2023, specializes in digital inequality, privacy, social media, telehealth, youth, and mental health.
Journal Articles (5)
Uncovering Personal Histories: A Technology-Mediated Approach to Eliciting Reflection on Identity Transitions
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction2023 When studying identity transitions, interview participants can find it difficult to reflect on their transitions and recall specific details related to past experiences. We present a new approach to enable participant reflection on past identity transitions, and a means to fill in blanks by eliciting data that may not otherwise come up: showing participants sentiment visualizations of their social media data. After detailing our methods of constructing sentiment visualizations, we discuss our experiences using them in a study on gender transition.
Advocacy as Access Work: How People with Visual Impairments Gain Access to Digital Banking in India
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction2023 Research in accessibility and assistive technology often assumes that technology is within easy reach, that is, people with disabilities are able to obtain technologies so long as they are accessible. As a result, less is understood about the challenges that people with disabilities face in obtaining technology in the first place and how they work around these challenges. We reduce this gap by examining the technology access challenges of people with visual impairments in India in the context of digital banking.
Nothing Micro About It: Examining Ableist Microaggressions on Social Media
ASSETS '22: Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility2022 Ableist microaggressions are subtle forms of discrimination that disabled people experience daily, perpetuating inequalities and maintaining their ongoing marginalization. Despite the importance of understanding such harms, little work has been done to examine how disabled people are discriminated against online. We address this gap by investigating how disabled people experience ableist microaggressions on social media and how they respond to and cope with these experiences.
Negotiating Intersectional Non-Normative Queer Identities in India
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems2021 Academic work dealing with queerness in HCI is predominantly based in the Global North and has often dealt with one identity dimension at a time. This work-in-progress study attempts to complicate the notion of queerness in HCI by highlighting how in the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multi-cultural context of India, LGBTQ+ movements and spaces are deeply fractured on the basis of various identity intersections.
The Situated, Relational, and Evolving Nature of Epilepsy Diagnosis
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction2021 An understanding of medical diagnosis as it is practiced is essential for those seeking to support it using intelligent systems. Through the case of epilepsy, we show that diagnosis is a situated, relational, and evolving process that accounts for information well beyond the patient's physiology, even for physiological phenomena like seizures.
