
Chelsea Barabas

Chelsea Barabas is a scholar and cultural organizer whose work emerges through collaboration with communities confronting the harms of surveillance and punitive technologies. Rooted in both research and the arts, her practice draws on Black studies, feminist thought, and postcolonial traditions to connect contemporary debates on algorithmic governance with longer histories of racial capitalism and resistance.
She is currently a Bullard Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information and Curator and Lead Researcher with the Edgelands Institute in Houston, where she works with artists, educators, and youth on initiatives such as the Glitch Lab artist residency and the No Data About Us Without Us Fellowship. She also serves on the Steering Committee of the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition, a national network challenging the expansion of youth surveillance in schools.
Barabas completed her PhD at the MIT Media Lab and has held fellowships at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the MIT Media Lab. Across her work, she is committed to building grassroots infrastructures that challenge algorithmic oppression and widen the horizon of possibility for more just digital futures.