Welcome to my webpage!
I am a tenured, Associate Professor at Georgetown University.
I am currently in the Science, Technology and International Affairs program at the School of Foreign Service. I am affliated with the Center of Digital Ethics and the Massive Data Institute.
You could contact me at: rv408@georgetown.edu
My work focuses on the intersection of technical and critical approaches to designing computing technology, exploring how they can empower marginalized citizens. My work seeks to center marginalized citizens’ experience in computing. Broadly, my research combines bodies of scholarship and practice in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), which embraces the ethos of marginalized citizens-centered design and applies it to global human development and policy.
Increasingly, I see my work is at the intersection of AI, digital technology, data and governance globally.
I employ various research methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, building software, and machine learning. Geographically, most of my work has been in multiple Indian states (Maharashtra, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi). I also collaborate with others to extend the work globally, most recently in the U.S., Mexico, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Overall, there is tremendous excitement about using digital technology, data, and algorithms to give marginalized populations greater voice and participation in programs that deliver goods and services to them. However, achieving this in actual practice proves challenging due to problems with the technologies themselves and to contend with the political contestation inherent in implementation.
My work speaks to both of these concerns by creating more suitable technologies and interventions that address interference due to issues of authority and control. Specifically, I leverage my technical and sociological training to design and study technology-enabled information interventions, applying a method that is half participant observation and half interventionist activism.
I started my academic career as a computer scientist interested in development issues. My initial forays into research were at Microsoft Research in Bangalore, where we worked on some of the earliest development interventions using mobile phones. Before that, I worked as a programmer for six years at Microsoft in different product groups in the US. I co-founded an NGO, Digital Green, which is now a major agricultural outreach organization.
I have a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley from the school of information. I was advised by Peter Evans (Sociology), AnnaLee Saxenian (information School), Paul Duguid (information school) and Michael Burawoy (Sociology).
I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University working closely with Patrick Heller.
I was a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University. I consulted for the Gates Foundation and the transparency and accountability initiative at the Open Society Foundation.
Before moving to academia, I worked as an associate researcher at the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research, India. In my prior life, I was a software developer at Microsoft working in many different product groups.
You can see my CV here.
Book
NEW Book: Patching Development: Informational Politics and Social Change in India. Oxford University Press, Modern South Asia Series. December 2021.
Won the Honorable Mention for the 2023 SPAR Book Award organized by the American Society for Public Administration!
Won the Honorable Mention Award for the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Development's Book Award, 2022
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms. Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. Patching Development is an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines NREGA's implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It is concerned with understanding what happens when social-movement- led reform meets the heavy hand of bureaucracy. I find that the local system of power, which is an anti-worker nexus, is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia but because of coercive counter strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process I call patching development. "Patching development" is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical innovation that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits.
This book expands the conventional wisdom that centralized state institutions can adapt to realities on the ground by leveraging technology and localized information to address problems in implementation. Work from this line of work has appeared in journals which include World Development, Economic and Political Weekly, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, and Information and Communication Technology for Development
Order: https://www.amazon.com/Patching-Development-Information-Politics-Social/dp/0197567827
Book Reviews
Master file of all book reviews in one place: click here
Select Peer-reviewed Publications:
Naveena Karusala, Sohini Upadhyay, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Krzystzof Gajos Understanding Contestability on the Margins: Implications for the Design of Algorithmic Decision-making in Public Services: In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 2024). Association for Computing Machinery, May 2024, Article No: 478 Pages 1-16.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Atul Pokharel. Governance by Patching: A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive Policy Implementation." Studies in Comparative International Development (2024): 1-23.
Wilcox, L., Shelby, R., Veeraraghavan, R., Haimson, O., Erickson, G., Turken, M., & Gulotta, B. (2023). Infrastructuring Care Ecologies: How Trans and Non-Binary People Meet Health and Well-Being Needs through Technology. (Best Paper Award)
Nithya Sambasivan, Rajesh Veeraraghavan. 2022. The Deskilling of Domain Expertise in AI Development. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, Article 587, 1-14.
Azaghu Meena, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Nithya Sambasivan, Vivek Srinivasan, Vinodh Kumar, and Shivani Kapania. Inheriting Discrimination: Datafication Encounters of Marginalised Workers in India. IEEE/ACM Int’l Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, Seattle, USA, 2022, 17 pages.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Cat and Mouse Game: Patching Bureaucratic Work Relations by Patching Technologies. PACM: Human-Computer Interaction: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), Vol. 5, No. CSCW1, Article 186, Pages 1-21. April 2021. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Vivek Srinivasan, Rajendran, Narayanan, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Vibhore Vardhan. Are Technology-enabled Cash Transfers Really ‘Direct’? Economic and Political Weekly, 53(30), Pages 58-64, 2018.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Strategies for Synergy in a High Modernist Project: Two Community Responses to India’s NREGA Rural Work Program. November 2017. World Development Volume 99, Pages 203-213.
Megan Finn, Janaki Srinivasan, Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Seeing with Paper: Government Documents and Material Participation. “Documents and Work track” (authorship equally shared) HICCS. Hawaii, January 2014. ***Best Paper Award under Digital and Social Media Category***
Rajesh Veeraraghavan. Dealing with the Digital Panopticon: The Use and Subversion of ICT in an Indian Bureaucracy. IEEE/ACM Int’l Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, Cape Town, South Africa, December 2013.
Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Naga Yasodhar, Kentaro Toyama, Warana Unwired: Replacing PCs with Mobile Phones in a Rural Sugarcane Cooperative. Information Technologies & International Development, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp 81-95, Spring 2009.
*** Best of ICTD Special Issue ***
11. Rikin Gandhi, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Kentaro Toyama, Vanaja Ramprasad. Digital Green: Participatory Video for Agricultural Extension. Information Technologies & International Development, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp 1-15, Spring 2009.
*** Best of ICTD Special Issue ***
Research Impact beyond papers
Co-founded this research project to work with marginalized farmers to build socio-technical solutions. Visit Digital Green here
Founded this project. Our goal is to use socio-spatial data to investigate the political and administrative forces that have shaped unequal urban development and outcomes. We had the opportunity to play a critical role during COVID relief. See more information here.
Active Research Projects
I am workin
1) Urban Spatial Observatory: Mapping Unequal Access to Public Services in New Delhi, India. (with Patrick Heller, Aashish Gupta, Hrid Bijoy and Bob Bell) Our goal is to use socio-spatial data to investigate the political and administrative forces that have shaped unequal urban development and outcomes. Paper.
2) Understanding digital transformation of governance with Evagelia Tavoulareas
3) Farmer Chat experimentations with Digital Green
4) AI use in government (federal/DC) with Ashley Lin
Here is how to pronounce my name. https://namedrop.io/rajeshveeraraghavan
If you want to listen to a recent podcast about my book, https://lnkd.in/e9esPUhn
Bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/rajeshveera.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajesh-veeraraghavan-884bb5/
