We remain open to the orientations we do not yet have language for, creating space for the emerging and the unnamed in our technological futures.

**ROOT Lab is an interdisciplinary research group led by dr. vishal sharma at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We are a team of faculty, students, and community partners, co-investigating (a) how emerging technologies shape—and are shaped by—the socio-cultural, political-economic, and ecological worlds around us and (b) more sustainable ways of designing, building, and living with such technologies rooted in wellbeing and care for the planet and its residents. Our work aims to guide technological advancements that nurture socio-ecologically just futures for all, including more-than-human life forms. Our research spans HCI, AI, STS, ICTD, ICT4S, and their intersection.

Our Philosophy | Our Team | Current Research Themes | News | Join Us**

For a full and up-to-date list of publications, see the Google Scholar.

Our Philosophy

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Roots remind us that meaningful change begins beneath the surface. They grow not upward toward attention, but downward toward connection, anchoring, nourishing, and sustaining what follows. At ROOT, we believe technologies should strengthen relationships rather than extract from them, cultivate sufficiency rather than accelerate consumption, and help more just and livable worlds take root and blossom.

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Roots do not grow alone; they intertwine with soil, fungi, water, microbes, and neighboring plants, forming living networks of mutual dependence. They remind us that flourishing is never individual but relational. At ROOT, we draw inspiration from these hidden ecologies, studying how technologies can foster relationships of care, reciprocity, and collective flourishing rather than extraction and isolation.

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Our Team

Dr. Vishal Sharma Principal Investigator Assistant Professor UIUC

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Roots grow in the opposite direction from visibility, doing the quieter work of sustaining life. Rather than focusing only on the visible artifacts of technology, at ROOT, we investigate the deeper assumptions, infrastructures, values, and relationships from which technologies emerge. Reorienting these foundations is what allows different, better technology-mediated futures to bloom.

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Dr. Anupriya Tuli Research Collaborator Postdoctoral Researcher KTH Sweden

Dr. Nimra Ahmed Research Collaborator Postdoctoral Researcher University of Zurich

Dr. Bonnie Nardi Founding Mentor Professor Emeritus University of California Irvine

Dr. Asra Sakeen Wani Research Collaborator Postdoctoral Researcher Carleton University

Dr. Anjali Karol Mohan Research Collaborator Urban and Regional Planner Integrated Design, India

Dr. Karla Badillo-Urquiola Mentor Assistant Professor University of Notre Dame

Dr. Beatriz Palacios Abad Research Collaborator Assistant Professor University of New Mexico

Current Research Themes

**For a full list of publications, see the Google Scholar.

Our research focuses across four interconnected threads: computing's growth imperative, our relationship with AI, technology's role in climate justice, and the politics of computing that produces these technologies.**

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Post-growth Computing Computing is built around an assumption that unbridled growth is possible. We see this assumption in the relentless pursuit of speed, scale, efficiency, and perpetual innovation. Computing also helps produce the growth imperative, creating a feedback loop in which computing enables economic growth and growth demands more computing—the cycle continues. However, perpetual growth is incompatible with finite ecological resources and increasingly strained socio-ecological systems. We examine what computing would become if growth were no longer its organizing objective. We establish Post-Growth Computing as a generative research program for reconsidering technology's objectives, infrastructures, practices, and pedagogy.

Post-growth Human–Computer Interaction Vishal Sharma, Neha Kumar, and Bonnie Nardi ACM TOCHI 2023

Sustainability, Development, and Human–Computer Interaction Vishal Sharma and Neha Kumar ACM CHI 2025

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Human-AI Interaction Beyond Adoption Much of Human-AI Interaction (HAI) research treats AI adoption as a default trajectory, with resistance, non-use, and discontinuance framed as a gap to close. Yet amid growing public warnings about AI's consequences and rising awareness of its costs, users are reconsidering their AI use. We examine the conditions under which people resist, disengage, or negotiate their use of AI, and what these acts reveal about the values embedded in technology. We understand resistance and non-use as legitimate, often necessary responses to technologies that concentrate power, externalize harm, or erode human judgment and autonomy.

Beyond Extraction? Generating Games with AI, Responsibly Vishal Sharma*, Eleanor Mather*, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, and Neha Kumar ACM DIS 2026

It Takes (at least) Two: The Work to Make Romance Work Vishal Sharma, Kirsten Bray, Neha Kumar, and Rebecca E. Grinter ACM CHI 2023

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Tech for Sustainability Emerging technologies, from generative AI to remote sensing and large-scale climate data platforms, are often positioned as tools for addressing the climate crisis, yet they can reproduce the extractive logics driving ecological harm, centralizing expertise, flattening local knowledge into optimizable data, and prioritizing scale over community agency. We examine who benefits from technology-mediated climate action, whose knowledge is rendered visible, and how technology can be redesigned to center the voices and needs of climate-vulnerable communities. Our work reimagines emerging technologies as infrastructures of care rather than extraction and control.

Whose Data Builds the City? Critical Data Practices for Socio-Environmentally Just Urbanization Vishal Sharma, Anjali Karol Mohan, and Neha Kumar ACM CHI 2026

Whose Participation Counts? Towards Technology-Mediated Equitable Futures of Development Work Vishal Sharma, Shivani A Mehta, Neha Kumar, and Aaditeshwar Seth ACM CHI 2026

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Politics and Justice in Computing Technology does not emerge from a neutral discipline. In computing, traditional structures determine who gets cited, whose work counts as rigorous, and who belongs. We examine the politics embedded within computing itself, asking how disciplinary structures marginalize certain scholars, methods, and epistemologies, and how more just and inclusive structures might be built in their place. We reimagine computing as a discipline that reflects the same values of justice and care that we ask of the technologies it produces.

UnWEIRDing Peer Review in Human Computer Interaction Hellina Hailu Nigatu*, Farhana Shahid*, Vishal Sharma, Abigail Oppong, Michaelanne Thomas, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed ACM CHI 2026

**Why do we need to learn about citational practices? Recognizing knowledge production from the global Souths and beyond** Amy Ogan, Frederick van Amstel, Gabriela Molina León, Juan Fernando Maestre, Kristin Williams, Nicola J Bidwell, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Saiph Savage, Sushil Oswal, Vishal Sharma ACM XRDS Crossroads 2023

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