Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Abhigya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/charting-the-discourse-of-nature-restoration-the-eu-nature-restoration-law-in-the-public-sphere-in-czechia/. About the post: Looking closely at the public discourse pertaining to Nature Restoration Law in Czechia, one observes that the lines against which these interests cleave and coalesce remain fairly blurry. Even in the European Parliament, 21 members of the conservative European People's Party (EPP) voted in favour of the law, significantly tipping the outcome in its favour and reaffirming the volatile nature of interest-group allegiances.

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/2026/07/digital-porosity-and-value-in-suspension-informal-economies-and-video-games/. About the post: When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy. (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 Adwaita Banerjee can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/the-monsters-we-buried-plastics-swamp-men-and-the-unquiet-ground-of-deonar/. About the post: Banerjee leads us into the heart of the Deonar Dumping Ground in eastern Mumbai, conjuring its monstrous presence through the lived experience of those who work there and its own as an ethnographer. Yet the monster, he reveals, is not a single beast. It is the relentless collision of old plastics, the scars of colonial land-making, faltering municipal systems, damaged ecologies, and the tireless labor of workers who live with the city's discarded past in the present.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/is-edtechs-stuckness-a-kind-of-fixation/. About the post: In this third addition to our series on stuckness, Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry suggest that the question of what emerges in the wake of getting stuck can also be a generative opening for scholarly reflexivity. In this piece on recent controversies around the use of AI assistants in classrooms in the United Kingdom, the authors situate this recent debate within a longer history in which new technology has repeatedly promised to revolutionize education and failed to materialize that claim. The current moment is not the first time when claims of technologically driven progress got stuck. By dwelling on this muddy history rather than focusing solely on the latest technology and its limits, Oliver and Henry offer a novel reading of the contemporary controversy around AI. This case highlights how stuckness can be a resource for scholars hoping to understand the enduring appeals and pitfall

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Victor Secco can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/searching-for-microbes-with-no-name-the-labour-of-sampling-and-the-making-of-scientific-value/. About the post: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with microbiome scientists on a sampling expedition along Europe's coastlines, this post follows the manual, embodied labour that turns soil, water, sand, and air into biological data. It argues that the value circulating in bioinformatics is created earlier, by hand, in the field—through the muddy, unglamorous work of collecting, labelling, and barcoding samples—even as that labour tends to disappear once samples are digitalized. It asks what counts as scientific work, where it happens, and who gets the credit for it.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Seon Shim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/collaborating-with-precarity-anthropology-on-crip-time/. About the post: Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short‑term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish threaten sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, raising a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within such a precarious, short‑term, and unequal academic landscape? This post explores disability anthropology and crip time as ways of inhabiting this contradiction differently, centering disabled temporalities, Indigenous frameworks, and collaborative, action‑oriented projects as methods for reassembling the discipline's colonial legacies toward more livable futures. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

Platypod is the official podcast of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. We talk about anthropology, STS, and all things tech. Tune in for conversations with researchers and experts on how technology is shaping our world. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/platypod-episode-twelve-hacking-alternative-futures/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tania Cristina Pérez-Bustos and Ana María Ulloa-Garzón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/why-study-smell-in-clothes/. About the post: The question that begins this text guides an investigation that brings together two fields that are marginal to the social studies of knowledge, materiality, and technology: olfactory studies and textile studies. At that intersection, we seek to ethnographically investigate a minor gesture: smelling the clothes of someone who is no longer there, within an everyday and domestic context. (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 Şafak Kılıçtepe and Emine Onculer Yayalar can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/between-cure-and-care-governing-bodies-in-turkiyes-hybrid-medical-landscape/. About the post: What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. (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 Vageesh Vishnoi can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/delivering-in-delhi-ethnographic-reflections-on-working-with-the-food-delivery-platform/. About the post: This ethnographic reflection emerges from participant observation as a food-delivery rider in Delhi and examines how platform workers navigate the spatiotemporal realities of gig work. While existing scholarship has extensively analysed algorithmic management, this account foregrounds workers' lived experiences of mobility, rest, and ephemerality. Drawing on fieldwork at delivery hotspots, it shows how workers transform platform infrastructures into spaces of sociability, mutual aid, and occasional resistance. The paper further explores the ephemeral nature of platform labour, where constantly changing incentive structures erode workers' ability to stabilise expectations and contest deteriorating conditions. Together, these dynamics reveal the everyday politics of algorithmic capitalism and workers' efforts to negotiate its contradictions.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes and Mandy Penney can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/becoming-with-mushrooms-multispecies-collective-autoethnography-for-reworlding-educational-environments/. About the post: Engaging with mushrooms as conceptual companions allowed us to explore the complex multiplicity of ways of knowing, living, being, and valuing that are entangled in world-building (van Dooren et. al., 2016). The mushroom, and more specifically, the entangled network of root structures below the visible fruiting body (known as the mycelial network), were “an embodied entry point” (Kapp, 2025) for reflection on how the structures, systems, and behaviors of mycelial networks could allow us to rethink and reshape knowledge sharing, perceptions of time, and constructions of self and knowledge in academia.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Neiman and Erin Coleman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/noclipping-into-the-contemporary-anthropology-in-the-backrooms/. About the post: Other franchises may inspire or invite fan art, fan theories, and fan fiction. But for Backrooms, this kind of participation is not incidental to the product; it is constitutive of it. Even for anthros who normally have no truck with narrative film in general, or who assiduously avoid horror in particular, we argue that the Backrooms phenomenon's remarkable resonance with young audiences, its unique origin story, and its productive blurring of the online, fictional, and physical worlds merits consideration for scholars of media, communication, and the present moment in general. Rarely in recent memory has blockbuster US cinema felt so tapped in to what it feels like to be alive right now,  make it excellent fodder for what Paul Rabinow (2007) identified as the field's ability to develop an “anthropology of the contemporary."

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Prerna Gupta can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/a-progress-without-people-six-decades-of-living-next-to-indias-first-nuclear-power-plant/. About the post: When officials from the Department of Atomic Energy first arrived to survey this coastline, the villagers had welcomed them with open arms. Jitendra Raul's father, then the sarpanch (village head) of Delwadi, sheltered the visiting scientists when their tents blew away. In the atmosphere of India's movement for independence, the villagers had greeted the nuclear reactor with pride, willingly giving up their lands for the nation's progress. However, for the past six decades, they have struggled to make their claim on it.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nga Shi Yeu and Nga Shi Yeu can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/viral-afterlives-toponymy-of-zoonotic-ruptures-in-west-malaysia/. About the post: This post examines the enduring social and material fallout of the 1999 Nipah virus outbreak in West Malaysia. Moving beyond bureaucratic public health frameworks, it looks at how a Chinese-majority pig-farming community navigates toponymic stigma and the debris of catastrophe. Through a lens of childhood retrospect, it traces the intimate violence of mass culls, marked by persistent sensory and acoustic hauntings within a severed human-porcine ecosystem. In response to recurring disruptions such as COVID-19 and African Swine Fever, villagers mobilize these historic ruins into an ordinary ethic of care and collective resilience. This heritagization, manifested through backyard husbandry and the creation of a grassroots viral museum, reclaims a marginalized history to negotiate state neglect and racialized biosecurity governance. (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 Leonardo Thibau can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/brazilian-manosphere/. About the post: This post maps the early formation of Brazilian masculinism through a multimodal critical cartography of “Canal do Búfalo,” a prominent online manosphere forum active in the early 2010s. Drawing on a scraped corpus of 20,189 posts by 2,900 authors, it examines how users geographically self-identified and mobilized toponymic aliases to frame belonging, resentment, and masculinist truth-making online. By combining digital methods, critical cartography, and debates on symbolic interactionism, the study discusses how this forum helped shape a masculinist worldview organized around adversity and opposition to feminism. The maps reveal a strong concentration of activity in Brazil's South and Southeast, while also highlighting regional variations in how users narratively framed their relation to territory. (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 Aylar Abdolahzadeh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/tracing-the-legacy-of-human-resilience-in-the-debris-of-ancient-campfires/. About the post: Have you ever made fire from scratch, without matches or charcoal? In the summer of 2015, I tried to recreate fire using flint, pyrite, and tinder. It quickly became clear that making fire is a learned skill that requires patience, observation, and practice but igniting fire was only the beginning because keeping that fire alive took even more effort. As an archaeologist, this experience led me to ask how our ancestors used, made, and maintained fire as a skill or catalyst. I began collecting, analyzing, and experimentally studying ancient fire traces, such as heat-altered stone tools, from sites across Europe and Southwest Asia. What I found was unexpected: despite the remarkable adaptability of our ancestors across time and space, fire use was far less consistent than I had assumed. Instead, it varied depending on where people lived and what their environments offered in terms of clima (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 Alejandro Cerón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/outbreak-mitigation-at-the-crossroads-technical-expertise-political-imperatives-and-the-myth-of-john-snow/. About the post: This essay analyzes the role of myth and narrative to analyze the tension between technical expertise and political imperatives in the work of mitigating outbreaks. The author draws upon ethnographic fieldwork with Guatemalan epidemiologists and their reflections on John Snow's intervention on cholera to show how this tension can be understood through the use of myth and narrative in society. (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 Cristian Gustavo Gutiérrez Pinzón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/is-this-the-end-of-disability-eugenics-and-the-technification-of-normalization/. About the post: New reproductive and bodily intervention biotechnologies not only promise to cure or prevent diseases, but are also shaping a new regime of bodily normalization that redefines which lives are desirable, correctable, or eliminable. For several years, countries such as Iceland have stood out for medical procedures that identify the conditions under which a fetus is developing and then ask parents whether they wish to continue or terminate the pregnancy. Between 80–85% of pregnant women in Iceland undergo prenatal screening and, when the result is positive for trisomy 21, termination rates approach 100%...Geneticist Kari Stefansson, founder of deCODE Genetics, stated: “My understanding is, basically, that we have almost eradicated Down syndrome from our society; there will hardly ever again be a child with Down syndrome in Iceland” (Quijano, 2017). (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 Leonardo Vilaça Dupin, Ana Paula Perrota and Rosângela Pezza Cintrão can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/food-insecurity-under-the-microscope/. About the post: In November 2025, in Rio de Janeiro, the seminar Food (in)Security under the Microscope brought together researchers from different countries and professionals from various fields of knowledge to discuss inclusive sanitary norms for non-industrial food production. Biosafety requirements, which equate "food safety" with sterilization and the absence of microbiological contaminants, oversimplify the complex relationships between humans, non-humans, microbes, and their environments, and are generally at odds with the traditional knowledge and practices of family farmers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and traditional communities across Brazil. The seminar sought to bring interdisciplinary research and new evidence on the importance of microbiological diversity as constitutive of human and environmental health, contributing to a challenge of Pasteurian views that consider only its pathogenic (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 Debjani Chakraborty can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/domesticating-affordances-from-surveillance-to-navigation-of-interfaces-how-affordances-are-reappropriated-across-contexts-by-rural-indian-women/. About the post: Affordances across social media platforms… are reappropriated as a tool of surveillance, and become grounds for moral judgement of the user. For women in collectivist settings, like in many rural Indian villages, being online is not neutral. It is evaluated through reappropriation. Time spent on the phone can invite scrutiny: why is she online so often? Who is she talking to? For how long?

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/2026/05/why-do-we-weave-networks-mapping-the-common-territory-of-latin-american-feminist-anthropology-of-science-and-technology/. About the post: I watch time pass back and forth, back and forth. And I rest, thinking… why do we weave networks after all? (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 Sandrine Lambert can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/introducing-citizen-technology-ethnographic-insights-from-makerspaces/. About the post: Drawing on and challenging more familiar ideas such as citizen science and civic tech, the term citizen technology refers to technologies that are governable by and for citizens. For the author, the concept matters not only because it questions power in the production and application of technology, but also because of its practical relevance to education and other domains.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Kaitlyn Kathleen Rabach can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/becoming-experts-activists-working-against-science-based-on-misinformation/. About the post: In County Donegal, Ireland an estimated 30,000 buildings are crumbling due to defective concrete. Because of a grave misdiagnosis by the Irish government, homeowners cannot rely on politicians to be up to date on the scientific claims regarding their crumbling homes. As a result, homeowners have had to become experts themselves to question the scientific authority of the Irish government and fight for 100% redress.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nicole Ahoya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/tech-ing-the-justice-gap-and-or-reimagining-access-to-justice-in-africa/. About the post: Access to justice has increasingly become a focus in international development, shaping new justice initiatives in countries in the so-called Global South. Often framed as a “justice gap” having caused a “justice crisis,” questions have not only arisen how to generate data on and measure this gap, but also about how to close it, e.g. by “teching” it through AI. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research, this piece examines how such “justice crisis” narratives and approaches to deal with them both expose and shape understandings of justice. Taking Kenya as an example, data-driven justice systems and technologies, such as AI, illustrate both the promise and tensions of such developments. Rather than treating the justice gap as a purely technical problem, the post asks how “desirable futures” of justice are imagined, whose knowledge counts, and who gets to participate in shaping them.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jackie Ashkin, Alexander Foster and Madeline Augusta Turner can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/salt-a-provocation/. About the post: In this blogpost, we want to explore some of the ways that salt is emerging as a contested and existential matter of concern in the making of liveable environmental futures. By attending to the ways that salt reshapes environments and how we relate to them, we can foreground the material contingencies of continued economic, social, and political survival.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Thomson Chakramakkil can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/seeing-acting-believing-the-cyberknife-and-the-transformation-of-medical-imaging/. About the post: One cannot help but be convinced that this is what medical salvation looks like. In some respects, I am already a believer. In May 2025, a month after receiving a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis, I underwent image-guided radiation therapy under Dr. Sinha's supervision, becoming one of the very few patients  approved for this advanced form of stereotactic radiosurgery. After months of misdiagnosis from pulmonologists working through experience and statistical generalisation, it was computer-aided imaging that revealed the adenocarcinoma that was rapidly spreading through my body. By looking at the MRI image, any oncologist could tell that my cancer had metastasized into the brain, creating eight lesions that could not be targeted through traditional chemotherapy. At this stage, even radiation therapy was, to borrow Julie Livingston's words, “a necessary exercise in hope” (2012: 161).

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Bronte Jones can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/microbes-and-the-permeable-body-rethinking-health-through-the-holobiont/. About the post: As microbiome research unsettles our assumptions about microorganisms and the role they play in human bodies, the holobiont concept provides a framework for understanding health as relational and ecological.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Valeria Sánchez-Prieto can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/animals-in-war-multispecies-agency-and-the-memory-of-the-colombian-armed-conflict/. About the post: In one testimony from Colombia's armed conflict, a parrot named Lola repeated the phrases she heard around her: “Paraco asesino” (“paramilitary murderer”), “Viva la guerrilla” (“long live the guerrilla”), and “The vultures are coming” Her voice condensed the sounds, fears, and political tensions of war into a multispecies archive of memory. Far from being passive witnesses, animals moved within the infrastructures of conflict as companions, alarms, transportation, and sometimes even weapons. Yet these violent incorporations are only the most extreme expression of a broader multispecies world of conflict. (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 Christina Kefala can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/making-for-the-feed-creativity-platforms-and-visibility-in-china/. About the post: In China, creative production is immediately embedded within circuits of monetization and visibility. Content can move seamlessly from aesthetic expression to commercial transaction, collapsing distinctions between artist, influencer, and entrepreneur.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mauricio Baez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/what-would-happen-if-ethnographers-learned-to-process-signals/. About the post: In this piece, I use software typically employed for sound synthesis and real-time audiovisual composition, which allows sounds to be created and shaped digitally, often in connection with visual elements. In this particular case, I composed the music using synthesis, together with an audio-reactive visual system, in which the images change in response to the sound's rhythm, frequency, or intensity.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Awa Diagne can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/blood-circulation-opening-up-a-closed-system/. About the post: But, blood has never been a single, unified fluid. Among blood's several components—red blood cells, plasma, platelets—not all have the same exact velocity. When I began developing my dissertation project, which seeks to ethnographically follow blood across myriad institutions, locales and historical periods, I started to observe different models that helped me visualize blood circulation. For me, the question is thus not only how does blood work, but also how is it seen? And how can we better see it?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Faridah Laffan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/whats-in-a-name/. About the post: In 1870, Samuel Birch, respected Egyptologist at the British Museum, wished to form a society aimed at understanding the ancient near eastern world through its cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts. Similar organizations had existed, but none that lasted and certainly none that carried out the kind of rigorous geographical, archaeological, and philological work that Birch trusted. How could he create an organization centered around detailed intellectual research while holding the moneyed attention necessary to publish it? Specialist societies proliferated throughout the century, but whether they survived was down to numerous factors, not least of which were membership size and wealth. In the end, Birch leaned on the theological implications of his interests to devise a name for his organization calculated to attract the membership he needed: the Society of Biblical Archaeology was born. (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 Adam Matthew Mikhail can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/what-the-map-conceals-sovereignty-and-the-sea-in-the-strait-of-gibraltar/. About the post: Sovereignty at sea does not work the way maps suggest. The Strait of Gibraltar is not a line, it is a volume with depth, surface, and air. Its currents run in opposite directions, seasonal winds close it to small vessels for months, and fish migrations predate any legal framework by millennia. Governing this space means governing something that territorial thinking, built on the premise of fixed, bounded, and mappable surfaces, was never designed to handle. (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 Ritu Ghosh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/criminality-risk-and-labor-altruistic-surrogacy-in-contemporary-india/. About the post: By criminalizing surrogate workers' right to economic compensation for their biomedically intensive, risky, intimate labor, the state refuses to recognize them as workers, pushing them into further precarity. In allowing surrogacy to only be “altruistic” in the name of “exploitation,” the state turns a blind eye to surrogate workers' material and structural conditions, facilitating the growth of an underground market in commercial surrogacy that puts workers at greater risk instead.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Melissa Villa Nicholas can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/data-borders-three-years-later/. About the post: People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (2023 UC Press), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta and Eesha Kunduri can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/gender-dimensions-of-platform-work-how-do-they-shape-unionizing/. About the post: The promise of flexibility has been a prime reason that attracted women workers to platforms like UC, as it enables them to access paid work while also attending to their housework and care work responsibilities. It is this very erosion of flexibility that women were holding UC to account for.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Alena Thiel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/techno-ethics-and-feminist-ai-what-role-for-an-african-studies-approach-to-science-and-technology/. About the post: As Francis Nyamnjoh reminds us, both “[b]odies and forms are never complete; they are open-ended malleable vessels to be appropriated by consciousness in its multiplicity. Bodies provide for hearts and minds to intermingle, accommodating the dreams and hopes of both, and mitigating the propensity of the one to outrace the other” (Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 257). This Platypus blog series explores how incompleteness provides an ethical stance by foregrounding interlinkages, connections and relations over the totalizing vision of African AI developments.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich and Pat Kinley can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/from-hotspots-to-outbreaks-keywords-for-ungrounding-space-temporality-and-the-boundaries-of-infection/. About the post: This series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. (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 Misria Shaik Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/on-resolving-controversies-enduring-regulatory-neglect-in-southern-tamil-nadu/. About the post: This post addresses how the controversy around the Kudankulam nuclear power Plant is being resolved, nearly 15 years after the 2011 protest where around 9000 people were charged with sedition and 55000 under several other charges. The post treats resolutions in three ways: resolving between multiple aspects and interest groups in a controversy, resolution as clarity about a controversy by meaning of accounting for the diverse perspectives, knowledges in decision making, and the resolved-ness against regulatory neglect. Resolving scientific controversies are significant to a dignified existence in the age of environmental in the age of environmental contamination, plagued by compounded causes and vulnerabilities. As science procedurally solves contamination's cause, victims in contaminated places await technoscientific answers to establish regulatory accountability.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Samiksha Bhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/the-human-cost-of-precision/. About the post: The use of AI tools in diagnostics claims to shorten the long and exhausting "diagnostic odyssey" of people with rare diseases. As a result, AI-assisted diagnostics is being framed as a 'disruptive technology' able to deliver precise diagnoses or diagnostic cues in just minutes. This piece questions the claim of disruption arguing that it is precision instead that becomes an ideal under late capitalism and shapes how technologies are valued as benevolent. Working through what Anibal Quijano called the 'colonial matrix of power', precision diagnostics that promise to care for sick and disabled bodies depend on the uneven labor conditions in the global South that perpetuate conditions of harm and distress for data and healthcare workers. Connecting these seemingly parallel developments in precision medicine and the data economy pushes us to confront the human costs of precision.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Eva Steinberg can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/love-at-first-sprout-wild-peanuts-and-mars-plan-for-climate-security/. About the post: Despite the toxicity and the chromosome doubling and the botanical reality of peanut reproduction, Mars's portrayal of peanut breeding as an all-natural gendered family unit contrasts the stability of the nuclear family with the instability of climate change. In doing so, the commodity, in this case Mars candies, becomes an essential safeguard against total climate and societal collapse–a world without peanuts.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Meenakshi Mani can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/engineering-through-stuckness/. About the post: In this first addition to our series on Stuckness, Meenakshi Mani shows that the everyday work of typically well-paid tech professionals—whether that be within specific domains like EdTech or within Big Tech—are by no means without frustration. As actors within an organization and a social network, these seemingly powerful workers find themselves constantly having to navigate hierarchies and make compromises. These moments of stuckness help illuminate the structural forces and material conditions that constrain the range of possibilities involved in technology building. By tracing stories of tech workers from India and the U.S, Meenakshi suggests that in the shared experience of stuckness, there are perhaps alliances to be conceived between different types of tech work and tech workers, across the Majority and Minority worlds.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jonathan Givan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/hip-hop-sampling-and-the-akai-mpc-as-a-platform-for-spatiotemporal-discourse/. About the post: This analysis moves away from exploring Hip Hop as a particular Black political action taking sonic form and towards an ontology of Black American Hip Hop production. This shift is valuable because the sonic underpinning of the beat is what contextualizes and informs the lyrical production done in real time by the emcee during the process of writing and recording their lyrics. In doing this contextualizing work, Hip Hop music producers redeployed the sampler as not just a musical instrument but as a platform on which new forms of dialogue were able to blossom.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Michelle Venetucci and Shoko Yamada can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/series-theorizing-stuckness-in-science-and-technology/. About the post: What might we learn by studying science and technology through the lens of stuckness? Scientific and technological practice has long been associated with notions of progress as a linear development, linked to key moments in history and developments that have led to our present moment. In this new series on Platypus, scholars who work directly with scientists and technological experts instead foreground moments of thwarted expectations and material constraints, highlighting that experts themselves do not necessarily experience their work as congruent with these notions of progress. By attending to moments when experts face obstacles to their work and feel stuck, the essays in this series draw out how people construct meaning out of these moments of becoming stuck, which then follows them into future decision-making.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rachel Lim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/there-is-a-climate-emergency-and-its-called-colonialism/. About the post: In this piece, author and artivist Rachel Lim highlights how the climate crisis is not a sudden "emergency" but the cumulative result of centuries of colonial dispossession and extraction. Lim critiques "crisis language," noting it often sidelines Indigenous sovereignty and favors capitalist expansion over genuine accountability. By drawing on academic scholarship and solidarity work with land defenders from the Wet'suwet'en to the Amazon, Lim highlights how "green transitions" can replicate colonial violence if they ignore Indigenous jurisdiction. The piece serves as a call to move beyond fear-driven rhetoric toward a framework of reciprocity and history. Accompanied by Lim's illustration, "Rooted in Our Heart," the article demands that climate action addresses colonialism as its root cause to achieve true justice.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by William F Stafford Jr can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/a-promise-of-safety-for-everyone-anywhere-any-time-the-panic-button-the-city-and-the-box/. About the post: As a system which depends on the coordination of complex technologies and infrastructures of communication, commerce, and bureaucracy, the panic button is exposed to a wide range of potential failure points.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Malcolm Katrak, Anushree Gupta and Debopriya Shome can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/transnational-translations-an-interdisciplinary-dialogue-on-platforms-and-labor/. About the post: This post is an Interdisciplinary dialog on platforms and labor. We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the labor deck research network. We have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig and platform movements, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers' voices, supporting unionization efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers' organizing.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Wood can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/seed-cycling-toward-a-crossroads-menstrual-positivity-and-hormone-practices-under-right-wing-regimes/. About the post: A constellation of women's health advocates, right-wing influencers, and lay experts have helped to proliferate negative information around hormonal contraceptives, including testimonials about side effects and doubts about their safety. This has unfolded alongside a renewed embrace of non-pharmaceutically suppressed menstruation.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome and Kaveri Medappa can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/01/writing-about-with-platform-unions-the-role-of-culture-politics-and-history/. About the post: Platform work has exposed larger numbers of workers, especially younger workers with little memory or experience of organising, to mobilise against capital and to do so using innovative means and campaigns. Through three vignettes, we bring the everyday together with the cultural, political histories and contexts of three metropolitan Indian cities – Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata, cities in which we have lived and engaged in research and activism with platform workers. Spanning between 2019 and 2025, these vignettes reflect the political landscape in India. They shed light on the capital–state nexus that limits the power of workers, unionization efforts built on foundations of loyalty and often exclusionary hypermasculine politics. What are the tensions and contradictions that we confronted while doing research with ‘gig' worker unions? To inhabit that space in between is to acknowledge t

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Chen Shen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/the-lung-tumor-we-know-exists-yet-that-we-cannot-see/. About the post: “The lung tumor we know exists yet that we cannot see” is a found footage essay film that assembles publicly available medical materials and original footage to explore how lung cancer is rendered visible—and remains invisible—through clinical regimes, and to reflect on how visibility operates as an epistemic practice that might be mobilized otherwise.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Daniela Manica and Fabiene Gama can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/what-not-to-do-if-you-are-accused-of-harassment-the-case-of-boaventura-de-souza-santos/. About the post: In this text, we intend to revisit the well-known case of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, following its unfolding since the accusations that surfaced after the publication of this book "Sexual Misconduct in Academia" in 2023. We summarize the main events since then, focusing on developing a counter-manual that didactically organizes the regrettable way in which the intellectual responded to the accusations and systematically retaliated against the victims. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)