Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Denis Sivkov can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/11/space-selfie-rethinking-scalarity-between-orbit-and-home/. About the post: By attempting a space selfie, ham radio enthusiasts are not expanding their home to the size of the universe, nor are they simply connecting home and places in the outer space. As Dmitry notes in his account of regular switching between being part of the global expanse and pursuing his everyday responsibilities, they practice scaling, whilst staying attuned to the incommensurability between a small home and the huge outer space. (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 Isha Bhallamudi and Anushree Gupta can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/11/series-introduction-the-politics-of-writing-about-platform-workers-organizing/. About the post: 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 Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, 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 unionisation 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 Martina Di Tullio can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/10/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-the-internet/. About the post: In the Andean cosmovision, constellations are not formed by connecting the dots of stars, but rather from the spaces of darkness in the night sky. The most important one is the Yakana, shaped like a llama —the most essential animal for life in the Andes. What might be seen as void, then, can reveal as much as, or even more than, the brightest star. This brief text reflects on the relevance of attending to those spaces, moments, and situations that remain undigitized in order to understand the social role of digital technologies and how they shape our lives. Much like the dark voids that give form to Andean constellations, these intervals can illuminate dimensions of existence that are otherwise overshadowed by the glow of the screens. (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 Rogelio Scott-Insua can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/10/freud-among-the-geneticists/. About the post: Rather than striving to reinscribe their discipline in the right side of the scientific demarcation, psychoanalysts are creating a tertiary terrain between the radical science/non-science separation. It is not about becoming a science or rebating the epithets of pseudo-science. Instead, “being with science”, “not being a non-science”, or “helping science” are the signifiers that circulate. (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 Juliana Vieira can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/10/uterus-transplantation-a-scientific-advance-or-the-reflection-of-gender-stereotypes/. About the post: After all, to what extent do highly innovative medical technologies, such as uterus transplantation, cease to express a progressive vision of the future and instead reinforce morally conservative values related to motherhood, gender, and gestation? (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 Lyndsey Beutin and Cal Biruk can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/10/when-queer-lovers-collaborate-the-rough-edges-of-smooth-knowledge-in-a-diabetes-research-project/. About the post: Our research on a medical condition that only one of us has but both of us live with is an apt site for considering questions of expertise, allocation of credit, and the complexities of embodied knowledge in collaborative anthropological research.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Addison Kerwin can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/10/behind-the-monster-reading-frankenstein-as-a-warning-against-isolation-greed-and-hubris-in-21st-century-agritech/. About the post: An analysis of Mary Shelley's allocation of blame in the novel Frankenstein reframes what “franken” signals in the term “franken-food.” Rather than marking genetically modified crops as inherently monstrous, the modifier highlights the responsibility of agritech creators, the ‘Frankensteins' who engineer and deploy the technology.

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/2025/10/necrovitality-and-porous-exclusions-on-dying-amidst-chemical-vitalities/. About the post: This piece introduces the concept of necro-vitality developed as a way of conversing about the intersection of materiality of chemicals and deathworlds. Responding to Gabrielle Hecht provocation and inspired by Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the author discusses how death, deadly conditions and deadly materiality of pores excludes lower caste and class temporary workers, and residents at Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill, Andhra Pradesh, India. Here people make life and living in deadly conditions of engineered porosity.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Samuel DiBella can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/10/dreaming-of-security-through-lanyards-and-bollards/. About the post: A perimeter is always porous, to certain people. Managing how it is perforated is a kind of professional work. Odd behavior is socially marked out and isolated. In the US security industry, by contrast, a similar function is exported to technologies of access control and credentialing. One of the central artefacts that exercises elements of both is the lanyard. Unlike the laminated ID alone, the lanyard presents a constellation of belonging all at once and, unlike the uniform, its lightweight profile and compact size allow more individual expression through clothing. In contrast to the social subtleties of the lanyard, I present a simple tool for physical security: the bollard. These metal poles offer a catastrophic resolution for problems of permission to access a space.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Manoela Karipuna can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/reflections-on-a-feminist-anthropology-or-a-mutirao-anthropology-karipuna-girls-and-women/. About the post: The ethnic reaffirmation of my mother, also an anthropologist, was important in stopping the processes of forgetting and invisibility regarding my origins. I bring up those questions today in my anthropological research. (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 Harshit Gujral, Selena Ling, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed and Tahiya Chowdhury can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/digital-colonialism-as-progress-what-will-convince-you-to-swap-your-guitar-for-an-ipad/. About the post: While Apple's controversial 'Crush' advertisement is about technological progress, this article argues that it represents a form of digital colonialism, where the compression of diverse, culturally significant creative tools into a single device reflects a historical pattern of devaluing cultural heritage in the name of a standardized vision of innovation.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Yue Zhao can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/a-feeling-for-information-technological-potentiality-and-embodied-futures-in-post-socialist-china/. About the post: Medical anthropologists and STS scholars have examined the epistemic roles of biomedical practices in creating future-oriented narratives of life's “potentiality” — visions of life that could and should be (Taussig et al., 2013). This post offers a historical glimpse into how information technologies—and the sociopolitical anticipation of their potential impacts—produced embodied forms of futurity in the context of reform-era China, shaping intellectual and popular practices around humans' bodily sensory and cognitive capacities as sites of optimization and enhancement. I highlight two case studies in which historical actors in 1980s China imagined human bodies as information storage, sensors, and transmitters. In doing so, this post asks what it means to feel, sense, and be with information as the boundaries between nature and culture, the biological and technological, human and machine

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nadia Luis can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/collaborating-bodies-community-gardens-and-food-forests-in-central-texas/. About the post: Soils depend upon their ability to form relationships with a myriad of organisms. Like the human bodies that interact with it, soils are complex and worldly agents. Soils have different textures, grit, coarseness, porosity, specialization, various parent materials, as well as different memories...if soils are complex living organisms, then perhaps they can be considered to have a body. If soils have a body, then how does my human body collaborate with the soil's body?

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/2025/09/feeling-adrift-in-the-ethnography-of-a-laboratory/. About the post: This reflection explores the possibilities of broadening our perspective on laboratory work by incorporating an analysis of the ordinary dynamics that shape the surrounding spaces. I propose that such an examination can reveal an affective network shared between scientists and their environment, which is essential for understanding how the relationships necessary for research are produced and sustained. This is especially relevant for those of us interested in understanding the geopolitics of scientific knowledge in situated contexts, particularly within regions of the Global South.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Martin Jesper Larsson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/can-we-make-space-for-technique-politics-and-play-in-digital-coaching/. About the post: In Sweden, youth soccer is expected to be fun –but in a specific way. Rooted in the 19th-century idealization of amateurism over professionalism, fun in Swedish youth soccer has come to emphasize spontaneity, inclusion, and teamwork (Bachner, 2023). Over time, these amateur ideals have been woven into a broader political agenda in which youth sport is understood as a vehicle for public health, social integration and the cultivation of social capital (Doherty et al., 2013; Ekholm, 2018). I hadn't really perceived the problematic nature of these notions of fun and its broader political framework until I started working as a translator for the digital coaching app Supercoach, in 2018. Developed from the talent development methodology of IF Brommapojkarna –Sweden's most prolific soccer academy– Supercoach aimed to improve grassroots clubs through structured content and a clear pedagogical pr (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 Emma Jahoda-Brown can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/odors-leakage-and-containment-the-story-of-a-southern-california-landfill/. About the post: My interest in Chiquita Canyon and the community of Val Verde grew out of my involvement with the community opposition to the landfill expansion in 2017. Now, as an anthropology student, my focus has shifted to how the sensory experience of Chiquita Canyon is interpreted, classified, regulated and elusive to regulatory agencies, community members and landfill operators and how these experiences come into conflict. Community members can use odor complaints filed through regulatory agencies to argue the case that the landfill is causing harm. These odor complaints, however, are highly contested by landfill operators as it is difficult to prove that odors are coming from the landfill as opposed to another source.

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/2025/08/for-the-flourishing-of-feminist-sciences-distributing-seeds-from-the-rafect-network/. About the post: In a political and scientific landscape that is becoming ever more arid, tense, and hostile to the struggles for transformation and social justice, it is with great joy and enthusiasm that we present this series of four posts written by Brazilian feminist anthropologists and intended for academic readers specializing in STS, as well as for readers in broader feminist networks and activist/grassroots communities. (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/2025/08/the-politics-of-translation-across-policy-grant-proposal-and-agricultural-landscapes/. About the post: In June, we submitted a modified scope and budget to align with new requirements and policy priorities while striving to maintain the overall objective: to support producers to expand sustainable agricultural practices and access to related markets. We are still waiting for the USDA's decision on what I call Project A version 2.0. In this post, I examine the dynamics of transdisciplinary agricultural research in the context of recent, stark changes in political priorities. I consider the mobilization of the term “underserved producers” to shape research objectives and activities through processes of translation from government policy priorities to grant proposals and participant-recruitment efforts.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Vasundhara Bhojvaid can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/08/hawa-laat-polluted-air-in-delhi-india/. About the post: Experts ascertain that air pollution is a regional phenomenon engulfing the Indo-Gangetic Plain that encompasses northern and eastern India (including Delhi), eastern Pakistan, southern Nepal, and almost all of Bangladesh (Hameed et al. 2000; Ramanathan and Raman 2005). This regional assessment too requires the mediation of human-made science that seeks to quantify the effects of materials in the air inhaled by breathing bodies. However, in popular discourse the air pollution problem in the Indo-Gangetic Plain remains a largely urban issue. My intent then is to interrogate how Delhi became a hawaalat since 2014, a city that seemingly encloses air in popular imagination, and not lose sight of the slippery and ephemeral planetary circulations of air. (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 Anushree Gupta can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/patch-working-the-field-methodological-reorientations-during-a-global-pandemic/. About the post: My research has been a culmination of witnessing, participating, and archiving otherwise invisible acts of care, hopeful experimentation, and provisional collaboration that enabled urban survival in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paying attention to provisional and patchworked modes of response, and offering a partial yet grounded view, created a critical vantage point to examine the evolution of digital platformisation through different phases of the pandemic and beyond. Auto-ethnographic curiosities about the normalization of digital platforms for accessing necessities during the pandemic led me to ask what exactly was being platformised.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Spencer Kaplan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/technics-in-the-dust/. About the post: Each year, thousands of Bay-Area tech workers attend Burning Man: an annual art festival in the Nevada desert. In this article, an ethnographer of AI development joins his interlocutors at the event and reflects on its resonances with the AI industry he studies. He argues that Burning Man's unique environment and otherworldly experiences can help us think about the AI industry's aspirations for civilizational transformation.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Su can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/the-sovereignty-of-wearables-indigenous-health-and-digital-colonialism-in-taiwan/. About the post: While the language of an easy technological “solution” certainly cannot undo the history of Indigenous injustice in Taiwan, it is important to remember that new technologies always also bring with them novel ways of imagining material relationships—of ownership, use, and control. To stay with such possibilities would entail not just denouncing health wearables altogether or aspiring toward a technology-free past, but would allow us to locate different ways that the trajectory of wearables might be changed to emphasize new relations of governance and self-determination.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Hui Wen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/i-just-want-to-be-happy-singing-scrolling-and-healing-in-a-chinese-seniors-digital-life/. About the post: Like many older adults in China, Auntie Zhang has found her own way into the digital world. Her fascination with short videos is not about escaping reality, but her way of engaging with reality and making sense of it. When she scrolls, sings along, and lip-syncs, she holds onto her core values that life has often shaken but not erased. The sentimental ballads drifting through these online videos give shape to frustrations and bafflement that rarely find words. Although dismissed by outsiders as shallow or “tacky,” these short clips offer their creators something that lingers beyond fleeting internet trends: a way to reconcile with the past, to momentarily soften its sharp edges, and to craft a version of life that feels both bearable and expressive. (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 Eric Orlowski and Juan Forero-Duarte can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/excavating-cosmotechnical-diversity-in-colombia-and-sweden/. About the post: "Excavating" Cosmotechnical Diversity in Colombia and Sweden offers an ethnographic comparative study of metaphorical Silicon Valley's within local contexts of Sweden and Columbia using Yuk Hui's (2017) cosmotechnics as a conceptual framework.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/simulating-systemic-violence-game-design-as-speculative-ethnography-in-seven-days-of-destruction/. About the post: “Seven Days of Destruction” is a speculative game that confronts the structural logics of gun violence in the U.S.—poverty, miseducation, addiction—not through realism but through allegory and constraint. Set in a surreal environment of surveillance and coercion, players navigate ethical compromise and systemic complicity. Designed in the wake of campus shootings, the game merges procedural rhetoric with speculative ethnography, asking: what if the unplayable conditions of real life could be felt, not just represented? This post reflects on game design as method and politics, where playing the system becomes a mode of critique.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Kate Zogaj can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/smart-wallets-and-the-shifting-boundaries-of-trust-in-decentralized-finance/. About the post: This article explores how smart wallets not only reflect changing technological norms but also reveal deeper social and political dynamics. Drawing on themes of delegated trust, infrastructure politics, and usability, it asks what kinds of financial agency are being enabled—or foreclosed—as DeFi (Decentralized Finance) tools move from niche platforms to mainstream adoption.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elexis Williams Gray can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/submarine-cyborgs-at-sea-with-haraway-and-jue/. About the post: The history of human relations with the Earth's oceans and seas is an old one, set back into deep time. As long as humans have been living by the shores of this planet, we have found ourselves drawn to marine worlds and species, to the fluid enchantments of water, waves, salt, spray, submersion. However, it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to consider that the ocean itself has a history. Drawing on the insights of scholars who have traced transformations in human-ocean relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this piece opens a small window into my research examining the figuration of the midcentury scientific diver, considering representations of hybridity and cyborg embodiment witnessed in the “manfish” of Jacques Cousteau's diving memoir The Silent World (1953), and a few relevant articulations (and critiques) of the submarine cyborg.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Vivette García-Deister can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/sts-academic-publishing-as-a-work-of-service-and-hope-a-conversation-with-vivette-garcia-deister/. About the post: I believe that my job as an editor is to encourage conversations and foster a dialogue between different epistemic traditions. To achieve this, I pay attention to the topics that are being discussed (...) There is a challenge in making explicit the relevance of the knowledge produced in Latin America at a global level. We aim to make authors' work visible at very different stages of their careers, from graduate students to established researchers. We guide authors to make their inter-translations as generative as possible (by this I mean, English versions of their texts that do not lose their local specificities). We also organize a peer review system that includes reviewers from the Global North and South. (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 Julián Medina-Zárate and Nicolas Lara-Rodriguez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/peasant-reserve-zones-as-techno-socio-environmental-assemblages/. About the post: Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories historically inhabited by peasant communities in Colombia. Designed as part of agrarian reform efforts, these zones are intended to promote environmental conservation and socioeconomic sustainability in rural areas. The ZRCs provide peasant organizations with a set of tools to structure their social, economic, political, and environmental governance. However, their effectiveness in achieving social and environmental objectives remains a subject of ongoing research across disciplines such as ecology, sociology, and economics. Existing studies yield inconclusive results, instead highlighting the complexity of the dynamics surrounding this institutional mechanism.  

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiên-Dung Hà can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/homecoming-tasting-death-in-a-vietnamese-forensic-laboratory/. About the post: This sacred obligation to the dead allows the Vietnamese forensic scientists and technicians to think beyond the dichotomies of martyr/non-martyr, or North/South Vietnamese. A high-level scientist at CDI once confided in me that there are many commingled remains between North and South Vietnamese or between Vietnamese and American soldiers, especially due to bodies getting tangled up in bombs and explosions. To this high-level scientist, these past political differences did not matter. They expressed to me their desire to identify everyone, meaning remains of not just the martyrs, but also the Southern Vietnamese soldiers and American soldiers. To my scientist interlocutors, every mother who has lost her children in the war deserves to know where their remains lie.

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.