Sulagna Basu is an Indian-Australian settler and first generation immigrant working at the intersection of Cybersecurity, Settler Colonial Studies, Feminist and Critical Geography, and Critical Security Studies. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney in the Discipline of Government and International Relations. Her dissertation examines the histories and imaginaries underlying U.S. cybersecurity policies that illuminate the complex intersecting dynamics of empire, settler colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Further research interests include examining the affordances, limitations, and entanglements of technology with race and gender. She has also worked on projects related to the gendered and technological aspects of the future of work and is more broadly interested in the exploration of different visions of technological futurities and the possibilities these may hold for marginalised and racialised communities to (re)historicise their material and social conditions. Sulagna is also committed to interdisciplinary scholarship having trained as an engineer along with several years of professional experience working across multiple projects collaborating with a diverse group of experts and stakeholders in the technology sector.
“What it means to be in transit, then, is to be in motion, to exist liminally in the ungrievable spaces of suspicion and unintelligibility. To be in transit is to be made to move.”
Intellectual Statement
I bring to my work a “relational racial consciousness” that motivates my commitment to reading power and its myriad manifestations through my research, pedagogy, and practice. This connects to my deep investment in citation practices and in centering the scholarship and contributions of Indigenous scholars, scholars of color, and those otherwise excluded or diminished within the limited canonical visions of what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge within the academy.
Importantly, this commitment also extends to a continuous, ongoing confrontation with my own research practices and knowledge production, as a non-Indigenous racialised settler scholar researching Indigenous histories and contemporary realities, as always already entangled with structures of dispossession and violence. As such, this forecloses any possibility of my research assuming any mastery or claims to authoritative knowledge and establishes my interpretations as inescapably partial, provisional, and contingent—hardly a reflection on Indigenous truths but a necessary grappling with the settler colonial logics and frameworks to which my ‘knowing’ is fundamentally bound. Read more.
