Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katie Ulrich can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/the-sugar-library/. About the post: The making of the online sugar library has unfolded amid growing discussions around Open Science, increasing concerns about AI training on stolen materials accessed online, and in the context of anthropology's fraught history obtaining and distributing others' knowledge without their permission. Which is to say, it was never a given how and why to share the sugar library as an accessible online repository.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Gregory can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/the-porosity-of-promise-metal-organic-frameworks-mofs-and-the-new-science-of-technofixation/. About the post: Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Arielle Milkman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/what-if-weve-been-thinking-about-wildfire-smoke-the-wrong-way/. About the post: Wildfire smoke toxicity is linked with multisystemic adverse health effects. Scientists are increasingly studying wildfire health impacts beyond respiratory and cardiovascular effects, including fertility issues and dementia. But what if we've been getting wildfire smoke wrong when we interpret it exclusively as a matter of exposure and a public health concern?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elie Danziger can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/the-ecosystem-multiple-navigating-the-transatlantic-fate-of-biosphere-1-%c2%bd/. About the post: Experimental "ecosystems" emerge from the relation between facilities. The DSE case shows how ecosystems are defined relationally, not only through interoperability (as with LEO), but also through ever-analogical definitions: the "ecosystem" idea is located at the meeting point of fully-interdependent instantiations by various experimental facilities across continents. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Neiman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/its-like-youre-welcome-love-science-on-doing-critical-anthropology-when-the-enterprise-is-under-attack/. About the post: Should we refrain from kicking science when it is down? Ought the level of our critique be calibrated by how vulnerable the scientific enterprise is in a given moment? Would we dare release a book called Against Health (Metzl & Kirkland 2010) in 2025, when being against health seems to explicitly be the order of the day? And how do we speak honestly about how much worse things have gotten without rehabilitating the tepid liberalism which got us here in the first place?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Hannah Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/laughter-and-dreaming-of-wins-in-recovery/. About the post: At Alliance Wellness, I also noticed how young Somali American men turn to humor and laughter to socialize experiences of sobriety or resist the structure and authority of Alcoholics Anonymous discourse while establishing rebellious rhythms and narratives of sobriety. However, as I played Ludo with these young men, I became more interested in how laughter also served as a ventilator of life and a space to imagine victory. The moment Somali American men entered their sober-living facilities, I would hear deep sighs of exhaustion and relief. Evenings at these sober homes became a site of raaxo (Somali for ease or pleasure) or nasasho (Somali for rest), phrases these young Somali American men informed me were among the many Somali words for healing.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Andrew Wiebe can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/toward-a-linked-data-approach-to-shifting-identities-and-null-values-in-data-sets/. About the post: Acknowledging shifting identities and embracing NULL values complicates data analysis but can ultimately produce more accurate and respectful records.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes and Felipe Figueiredo can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/data-centers-transnational-collaborations-and-the-differing-meanings-of-connection/. About the post: As anthropologists researching data centers, one of our goals is to point to a deeper timeline of events that have given form to what data centers are today. Our goal is to put data centers in context, and to reject narratives that place them outside of history. In putting data centers in context, we understand that the technology and infrastructure supporting current data centers are not new or exist thanks to the works of a single mind – putting data centers in context shows how digital technologies of the 21st are enacting forbindelse, they're combining pre-existing infrastructures and creating new relationships with other material technologies. They're connected to the past, despite the focus of the tech industry in a distant future, and their rejection of history. 

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jiwon Kim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/from-bin-to-bank-recycling-household-waste-in-urban-indonesia/. About the post: Environmental activists and industry professionals were hesitant to view them more than “housewives' plaything (main-mainan).” The quantity of waste banks' contribution to handling household waste pale in comparison to that of the informal waste pickers. Meanwhile, the members of waste banks themselves often describe their activity as “just social (sosial),” implying its communal nature is predicated on the absence of economic aspirations. This essay is an attempt to create a generative interval between them—one that pauses before settling into any singular narrative, allowing the complexity of waste bank practices to surface. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sebastian Zarate can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/who-will-protect-andean-potatoes-in-the-near-future-uncertainties-about-the-next-generation-of-native-potato-conservationists/. About the post: While potato farmers have been referred to as “guardians” of agrobiodiversity, little attention has been brought to the precarity of the continuity of this guardianship. The lack of youth and women farmers present at annual meetings and events puts into question who will be the agrodiversity guardians when the older generations of potato farmers pass on. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Allie E.S. Wist can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/bodies-as-proxies-or-the-stratigraphic-evidence-of-our-appetites-at-metabolic-scales-from-the-human-to-the-planetary-on-the-occasion-of-the-anthropocenes-ongoing-debate-about-itself/. About the post: In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. Through the generative space of contradictions, it serves as a somewhat experimental back-and-forth between permeable anthropos bodies and the epoch defined by the materials transgressing those bodies; between tangible forms of evidence and ephemeral ones; between precision and porosity.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Misria Shaik Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/witnessing-the-porous-world/. About the post: This blog series emerges from porous interventions at the intersections of environmental humanities and science and technology studies whereby scientized objects are opened to the world they animate through ethnographic engagements.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Virendra Mathur and Aarjav Chauhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/following-primates/. About the post: If the langurs moved to the agricultural fields or crossed the village, no data could be collected for a couple hours or more. In those moments, we would either wait, patiently hoping that the langurs would move to a “researchable zone”. Friction and conflicts were shaping research, and in turn, the science that was ultimately going to be produced.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Brittany Fields can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/the-limits-of-identity-how-race-and-gender-constructs-in-biometric-technology-narrow-who-we-are/. About the post: Identification through technologically assisted vision is therefore not revolutionary or transformative; instead, it perpetually sees others as they have always been seen. This line of sight ignores the immaterial, intangible, and unconscious but ever-present elements that constitute one's being and shapes their becoming.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda and nicolás gaitán-albarracín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/experimental-methodologies-for-listening-to-the-present-an-interview-with-alejandra-osejo-varona/. About the post: Feminist critiques and environmental anthropology explore the human and the non-human as something in constant production in relation to other beings. This has helped to relativize the centrality of word and vision. It has made it possible to draw on other senses to produce ethnographic knowledge and has given rise to new, more experimental methods. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elif Memis can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/the-politics-of-civic-education/. About the post: Educational institutions promote civic education through various simulations, to inform communities about democracy and citizenship. Although such practices indeed increase society's knowledge in civics, the absence of marginalized communities' representation ​​prevents societies from achieving an inclusive and representative democracy.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Yifan Xia can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/what-are-walking-simulators-ethnographically/. About the post: “Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the prevalence of computation, there is still something we can learn from sociocultural anthropology, especially the anthropological ways of writing cultures – ethnography.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cheryl Hagan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/responsible-ai-in-action-beyond-policy-regimes/. About the post: Researchers at RAIL are acting in good faith and their research requires them to negotiate and make choices that result in both inclusion and exclusion. They are also making choices that have been structured by colonial legacies.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katrina Nicole Matheson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/the-cyborg-is-dead-the-node-rises/. About the post: As social scientists, we can contribute to the creation of liberatory networks by shifting from investigations of embodied hybridity to examinations of nodality: why nodes connect and how they authenticate social constructions.  Arguably, this shift supports an epistemic departure from algorithmic Modernity to whatever qualitative, post-AI ethos may come next.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by A.R.E. Taylor can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/major-internet-outages-are-getting-bigger-and-occurring-more-often-a-reflection-on-the-crowdstrike-it-outage/. About the post: The CrowdStrike outage provided us with an eye-opening reminder of the vulnerabilities that arise from the centralization of computing infrastructure. When one corporation dominates its market to the extent that CrowdStrike does with endpoint security, the result is a single point of failure.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Emery Vanderburgh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/disruptions-in-grace-embracing-mutation-and-disability-in-nature-through-art/. About the post: For disabled audiences, an artistic language that represents how we see our skills, barriers and bodies can help to unite us by updating our activism's symbology to match new theories of disability.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Amrita Kurian can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/01/thinking-with-epistemic-things-quality-and-its-consequences-in-agri-commodities-markets/. About the post: What happens when an "epistemic thing"—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the pages collated from a scientific symposium and introduced into the real world?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rosario Rm can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/on-menstruation-and-feeling-shame/. About the post: Menstruation as a subject of study is not new. Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Bobel, Miren Guillo, and Karina Felitti, among many others, have discussed how menstruation has been related to specific practices, and how taboos present great dynamism and variability as specific cultural constructions frequently linked to systems of bodily control and gender. In this article, I present the advances of research that explores how taboos associated with menstruation are reflected in the bodily and emotional trajectory of menstruating women and people through the implementation of a methodology based on the collective construction of emotional corpobiographies (Ramírez, 2024). (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Valerie Berseth can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/swimming-against-the-current-navigating-distrust-in-open-science/. About the post: In the effort to build trust in science, the complexities of distrust must be confronted. Open science practices alone are unlikely to address deeper issues of power and people's past experiences with technology, particularly in times of increasing scarcity and uncertainty.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Matias Milia can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/commons-in-science-and-technology-dispatches-from-the-seekcommons-network/. About the post: As a distributed network of researchers, technologists, and environmental activists, we proposed, therefore, to shift the frame from debates about the promises and perils of “openness” to the anthropological question of the “common” as a mode of participatory governance that sits in between markets and states, but also, and most importantly, as a political principle for community-building around common tools and approaches to socio-environmental studies.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Henry Snow can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/work-together-eat-bread-together-stardew-valley-and-the-dream-of-the-commons/. About the post: “The Farm” is a saccharine settler colonialist homestead fantasy that legitimizes an industrial production process as dystopian as any. Perhaps the American gamer wants this too.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by PRATYUSHA KIRAN can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/underneath-it-all-unveiling-the-toxic-reality-of-fast-fashion-underwear-and-the-social-dimension-of-health/. About the post: The health concerns related to fast fashion primarily stem from chemicals in synthetic dyes and other low-quality raw materials used by manufacturers to keep the prices low. Exposure to these chemicals can be through the wastewater generated during manufacturing, and from direct contact with clothing itself.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Maythe Han can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/dining-with-dogs-more-than-human-relations-in-food-media/. About the post: Human and nonhuman lives may have first become closely entangled with the rise of agriculture as we raised animals to eat, and other animals that could help us manage the animals we raised to eat. However, the relationality between humans and animals expanded beyond that based on function and survival since the advent of agriculture. Today, we share our homes with them, and, as we will discuss in this post, our food and eating practices with them as valued members of more-than-human families, co-participating and co-producing our complex and ever-evolving cultures surrounding food.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aikaterini Mitselou and Isabell Hedke can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/green-lady-cambodia-a-small-initiative-for-a-big-change-on-menstrual-health-and-hygiene-education/. About the post: Achieving menstrual health is crucial for attaining good health and well-being, ensuring quality education and promoting gender equality.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Guillermo Echauri can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-the-digital-divide-new-dimensions-of-digital-inequality/. About the post: From the emergence of the Web, through milestones such as the rise of mobile phones and social media, and up to the current hype around AI, the development, access, and use of digital technologies have not been exempted from the impact of prevailing global inequalities, especially socio-economic ones. As these disparities emerge between regions, nations, societies and communities, digital inequalities continue to arise through various means and ways. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Savannah Mandel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/trade-versus-academic-press-part-2-of-publishing-in-academia/. About the post: The decision between the two publishers was not simple. It was financial. It was personal. It was intellectual. It was also ideological.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Clarissa Reche can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/how-to-create-figurations-and-inhabit-feminist-sts-research-a-diy-manual/. About the post: This is a DIY manual for working with figurations to inhabit feminist STS research. The methodological proposal of figuration, as described by Haraway, places us once again at the center of a basic procedure of technoscience, making us stay with the trouble. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Savannah Mandel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/do-academics-need-agents-part-1-of-publishing-in-academia/. About the post: If you hope to someday publish with a trade press such as Penguin, Harper Collins, or Simon & Schuster, or are interested in having stronger public representation for your work or developing your research in a more commercial style, you'll need to acquire an agent.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Matt Artz can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/brush-strokes-to-bytes-anthropological-praxis-in-business/. About the post: My research revealed how these digital platforms, despite their initial promise of democratizing the art world, often reinforced and even amplified the existing hierarchies and inequalities I later witnessed in physical spaces like Art Basel. This digital entrenchment of inequality emerged as a key challenge that demanded innovative solutions. This is because the algorithms powering these platforms tend to favor artists or gallerists who already have name recognition, a significant following, press, positive reviews, or a history of sales. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where popular art market participants become more visible, leading to more sales and recognition, boosting their visibility even further.

A podcast about making a podcast which is really just a conversation among two friends who used to be close friends, a long time ago. Transcript available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y8dOEXz7FEqWQEMPHHsH3EU0NFIlpTVx/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108539968411457483057&rtpof=true&sd=true Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/worrying-over-speaking-and-the-pretentiousness-of-podcasts/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Iván Flores can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/chaotic-oscillation-understanding-the-paradoxical-presence-of-video-games-in-contemporary-society/. About the post: Common sense tells us that play and work are opposing categories. However, in our society, we often encounter situations where the boundaries between these two categories become difficult to distinguish. It's common that people earn money from hobbies—activities that common sense typically does not associate with the effort required for any form of work and mostly because they are fun. These include recording oneself dancing on the street, doing product unboxings, or streaming while playing video games. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by María Fernanda Lartigue Marín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/critical-metals-magic-tricks-and-energy-transition-a-social-biography-of-lithium/. About the post: By exploring lithium's social biography, I hope to offer an example of ways in which anthropology can interrogate the magic tricks and technofixes that have come into existence in the context of global cooperation for climate change mitigation. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cody Skahan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/geoengineering-de-facto-environmental-governance-and-alternative-future-making/. About the post: In the absence of an appropriate governing institution, de facto governance (i.e., governance that does not proceed through “proper” channels) of geoengineering has occurred through its inclusion in a series of high-level scientific reports without being subjected to in-depth political questioning about how geoengineering will affect or be affected by notions of justice, power, and responsibility. This governance vacuum has excluded youth and Indigenous People (some of which who are also youth) alike from discourses around geoengineering, a common theme in international environmental governance.

Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration chronicles the author's journey as a scholar and a young woman working in the commercial space industry in the US. It also talks about the difficulties of gaining access to certain technical field sites. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/space-anthropology-with-savannah-mandel/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Beatriz Klimeck can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/from-a-hashtag-to-the-right-for-indoor-air-quality-a-short-story-of-the-covidisairborne-movement/. About the post: Isolated during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to follow on Twitter (social media platform now called X) a few scientists who were dedicating part of their time to share information about disease prevention. From that personal curiosity emerged an interest in a feud happening between tweets, likes and retweets: the World Health Organization had tweeted a "fact-checking" publication stating that Covid was not airborne. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/foucault-dialectics-and-randomized-clinical-trials-bridges-between-medicine-and-anthropology/. About the post: I hope that other scientists understand anthropology, but at the same time, it's essential that anthropology also enters other spaces and accepts invitations outside of its own citadel. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cydney Seigerman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/from-foraging-to-keeping-bees-in-northeast-brazil/. About the post: For Rogério and other meleiros, greater awareness of the environmental impact of their foraging practices developed  through their transition from meleiro to apicultor (apiarist or beekeeper). Yet some former meleiros explained that they eventually began to cut out only part of the beehive to preserve the colony's integrity, illustrating how the introduction of beekeeping was not required for all meleiros to develop greater environmental awareness. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mine Egbatan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/commodifying-disability-as-an-experience/. About the post: In this post, I explore how disability is depoliticized when it is reduced to an individual, sensory experience within technologically reproduced spaces, isolated from the social, cultural, and political constructions of disability in Turkey. Does the sensory experience of disability reveal new ways of understanding the “other”?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Amanda Quan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/medicine-disoriented/. About the post: What follows is an object collection that troubles the arrival of The Clinic by engaging the historic underpinnings, cultural logics, and afterlives of its object parts. I think with the concept of simulation as one that refuses stable orientation as I deconstruct The Clinic, fold back its walls, and examine how each component is socially and politically entangled. Moving beyond the functional utility of clinical objects, I reorient my attention to their social lives and stories in order to unravel the directions of white hegemony which have shaped medicalized subjectivities, categories of citizenship, and diagnostic consequences in contemporary campaigns of exclusion. This is a project that aims to disorient and reorient by destabilizing object surfaces and welcoming alternative paths of arrival.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Madelyn Zander can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/the-cloud-is-too-loud-spotlighting-the-voices-of-community-activists-from-the-data-center-capital-of-the-world/. About the post: In this post, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2021 with community activists in Northern Virginia, a place known as the “data center capital of the world,” to bring the cloud's emerging sound pollution problem into focus.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mariel Garcia-Montes can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/challenging-normalized-surveillance-birds-on-the-wire-surveillance-in-mexico/. About the post: The ways that surveillance technology is acquired and deployed, often in the name of security, contributes to the establishment of a culture where surveillance is normalized. However, this move is not devoid of tensions, as the high social costs of surveillance efforts become visible and sectors of civil society begin to challenge the emerging sociotechnical status quo. I also point to the ways that these developments have made an impact beyond Mexican borders, in the global surveillance technology market, and among global advocacy movements organizing around privacy rights. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Yuna Hwang can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/questioning-the-market-how-did-the-south-korean-camming-beot-bang-market-grow/. About the post: Drawing on new economic sociology to consider markets as social networks, along with a historical-institutional perspective emphasizing the sociopolitical contexts that enable market construction and operation (Chun and Lee, 2023), this work approaches Boet-bang markets as socio-cultural constructs rather than a priori phenomenon. So, in what political and institutional context was the Beot-bang market created in Korea? (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Chu May Paing can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/07/trolling-breaking-rules-poking-fun-or-just-outright-harassment/. About the post: What is the social function of trolling and in what context can trolling be an empowering act for those of us who are already systematically marginalized? What are the ways in which we could reduce online harm and harassment like this incident? (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Adriana Moreno can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/07/digital-anthropology-of-the-senses-connecting-technology-and-culture-through-the-sensory-world/. About the post: This post explores the relevance of studying the senses, particularly hearing and touch, from a digital anthropological perspective, taking advantage of the vast offer of audiovisual and transmedia content that already exists on the Internet: socio-digital platforms and streaming services. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by PEDRO DE MEDEIROS can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/07/cards-and-codes-spirituality-and-magic-in-the-biotechnological-era/. About the post: My proposal is to create a magical tool, a tarot deck, that provokes thought about how mystical and religious elements permeate the advancement of science and technology, especially in the field of biotechnology, and are in constant confluence with all aspects surrounding it: academia, startups, investors, and the like. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This podcast episode talks to three anthropologists, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Rine Vieth, and Kara White, scholars working in three different parts of the world who use multimodal methods in their teaching and research. It is not a history of multimodal methods, or even a really detailed review of them, instead, it is a consideration of some of the issues they raise or resolve for ethnography. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2024/07/the-many-modes-of-ethnography/