Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiffany Prendergast can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/softmaxxing-skepticism-how-looksmaxxing-culture-recruits-the-mainstream/. About the post: Because institutional medicine offers no real answer to aesthetic anxiety, the underground is able to fill the gap using rhetoric anti-vaccine influencers have already normalized. Peptide vendors and biohacking gurus borrow directly from that playbook: "Big pharma doesn't want you to know," "your doctor is behind the times," and "take health into your own hands." Anti-establishment framing isn't an accident here; it's baked into the pitch because the premise is that official channels already failed you.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Luisa Madrigal Marroquín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/imagined-geographies-from-urban-expertise-to-rural-health-intervention/. About the post: This post looks at how health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. The author argues that they also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. (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 Juan Camilo Ospina Deaza can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyond-deficit-toward-a-strengths-based-approach-to-male-infertility/. About the post: Concerns about declining sperm quality and male reproductive capacity have become increasingly prominent in scientific, clinical, and public discussions of fertility. Yet infertility has historically been located within women's bodies and treated primarily as a women's problem, placing women under disproportionate reproductive responsibility, scrutiny, blame, and clinical intervention. This framing has also contributed to men's reproductive bodies and experiences receiving comparatively limited attention. Growing concern about male reproductive capacity has been accompanied by increasing attention to how male fertility might be preserved, improved, and optimised, alongside broader demographic narratives that frame declining reproductive capacity as a potential threat to future populations. (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 Lucy Pei can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/transnational-solidarity-exploring-alternate-global-imaginaries-of-work/. About the post: What is the significance of gig worker activists' claim on the global scale in relation to reclaiming the futures of work? Following Anna Tsing, I consider scale to be “not just a neutral frame for viewing the world” but instead as something that “must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects,” (Tsing, 2005, p. 58). The sample book cover image and slogans are examples of how activists self-consciously claimed the global scale. A gig worker's complaints can be viewed as a personal-scale problem to be solved by finding a new job or getting reinstated. A union can assert itself as focused on the scale of the factory, the company, the city, or the nation. A social movement can style itself as being local or it can argue that the issues it addresses are global in scale. In addition

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Catherina Wilson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/smart-methods-whatsapp-ethics-and-inclusive-knowledge-production/. About the post: Digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have offered methodological opportunities for connection, data collection, and the democratization of knowledge production, in part because they are easily accessible and affordable. The advantages notwithstanding, we must critically reflect on the limitations and ethical implications of these digital platforms. Because WhatsApp is integrated into the lives of our research participants, it proved to be a useful tool during our own collaborative analysis and writing process too.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Fatima Tariq can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/time-virtuality-and-the-digital-sacred/. About the post: The above scene from Ramy (Season 2, Episode 7) depicts an absurd yet moving moment featuring characters Mo and Ahmed performing umrah through VR headsets. As Mo embraces the virtual Ka'aba, he tearfully breaks down; we see a performance of embodied devotion through his digitally mediated umrah experience. While VR pilgrimages remain niche and laughable to many, their use by some travel agencies and religious groups to practice for actual pilgrimage highlights how digital technologies are reshaping sacred journeys. This project attempts to interrogate how digital mediation transforms spatiotemporal logics of religious practice particularly through the lens of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981, Agha 2007), the co-constituion of time and space in narrative and interaction. Linguistic anthropology's concept of chronotope may help us unpack this tension.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ambar Reyes can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyond-delivering-food-networks-risk-and-the-hidden-infrastructure-of-gig-work/. About the post: Delivery workers do not merely use communication platforms; they inhabit and transform them into sociotechnical infrastructures of collective life. Through these arrangements, knowledge, social relations, moral authority, and identity are actively produced and maintained. In tracing the circulation of information, responsibility, and care across urban and transnational space, this blogpost reveals how systems designed for labor extraction are repurposed as infrastructures of care, accountability, and collective knowledge across neighbourhoods and national borders. (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 Emmanuel Anguiano-Hernández can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/strategies-and-tools-for-knowledge-generation-in-art-science/. About the post: To what extent do measurements from an electroencephalography headset provide evidence of the aesthetic contemplation state of the person wearing it? (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 Aldo Federico Palafox Hernández can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/kilitl-living-with-a-green-part-of-the-world-edible-greens-language-knowledge-and-territory/. About the post: In Mexico, quelites refers to uncultivated edible plants. The word has a Nahuatl origin derived from kilitl, a term referring to these edible weeds. The earliest dictionaries of colonial Mexico translated kilitl as “vegetable”, an equivalence that obscured the fact that they were collected (not cultivated), and interpreted them as any other green crop. There is an ongoing trend to revaluate quelites as a way to counter their gradual disappearance from national diets. These efforts involve universities, governmental and private institutions, civil associations, and organized 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 Lucy Pei, Joy Ming, Kim Fernandes and Rosemary Steup can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/reclaiming-the-future-of-work-series-introduction/. About the post: Global South, global majority, and decolonial lenses help us to break out of dominant points of view. Taking on a range of methods, the empirical and conceptual works draw lessons from workers' embodied experiences and relationships to one another and to the places they work, from discourse and discursive objects, and from speculative engagements.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Al Lim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/venture-capitals-due-diligence-or-ethnographys-adversarial-twin/. About the post: Anthropologists have long framed studying up as a problem of access: how to get inside institutions that do not want us (Nader 1972; Souleles 2018). My problem was different. Having spent time doing both ethnographic fieldwork and leading several venture investments, my problem was less about access than about processing the continuities and frictions between these two roles.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sridhar Raghavan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/silt-sea-and-coastal-engineering/. About the post: In 1870, the Vedaranyam canal is built connecting the Salt Pans nearby Palk bay coasts 5 to Nagapattinam – serving twin purposes of cheap transport of salt to Nagapattinam for trade, as well as deepening the river channels slightly upstream of the Port. A permanent wharf was constructed from some of the dredged sand in the 1870s. But dredging was repeatedly claimed as costly. Equally, the cyclone of 1862 damaged the extended river mouth groynes, and the British were able to repair them only by 1865. In 1909, experimental groynes erected at a distance from the river mouth were destroyed and washed away further south during the North East monsoon – which the Port Officer describes as “It will be seen by the above that these exposed groynes cannot withstand the fury of the northeast monsoon, and any expenditure on this account will be a waste of money”. (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 kayah can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/a-horse-in-the-archive-notes-on-incompleteness-in-biometric-infrastructures/. About the post: An essay on incompleteness as a constitutive property of biometric infrastructures. Beginning with the removal of two wisdom teeth — a piece of the body that leaves it once but whose record may keep circulating — it traces how bodies are decomposed into data, archived, and returned to their subjects only in fragments that never quite align. At its center is a speculative biometric archive, built as an interactive component, that enacts this logic directly: records repeat, some accesses are denied, and discovered records decay permanently with use. A horse the system cannot classify — but files anyway — marks the limit of what such an archive can hold. (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 Naijia Liu can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/can-you-hear-me-now-listening-in-chinas-romance-simulation-games/. About the post: Chinese romance games are built to make players feel heard, and the studios behind them promise the same. Drawing on fieldwork among players of China's female-oriented mobile games, this piece follows listening as it slips from a designed intimacy into a demand players make on the companies, and on the worlds these games represent.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Manar Naser can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/the-kids-are-ai-right/. About the post: My students were actively evaluating AI's role and utility rather than absorbing it uncritically. This complicates the assumption that children are passive recipients of a technological future being built for them. Education policy is actively being shaped by the potential of an education in and conducted by AI rather than considering the students they are pushing this upon

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lachlan Hensey can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/dispatch-from-seoul-reflections-on-the-science-technology-human-values-science-and-technology-studies-school-june-2026/. About the post: In June, emerging STS scholars gathered in Seoul to workshop draft manuscripts, encountering charismatic objects and a “concrete fish tank”. In this post, Lachlan Hensey reflects on the 2026 ST&HV STS School: It seems many of us happened upon STS quite unexpectedly, but also gratefully, hesitantly or far later than we now wish. Whatever the case, misfits or meanderers, there we were—in Seoul, ‘doing STS'—evolving a shared language to articulate that which is obscured, tacit, or might be otherwise. And although there is often a hint of deviance, mischief or even alienation that colours the way STS scholars describe and relate to their research contexts—as “tricksters”, perhaps—there are few punchlines or ‘gotcha' moments among these manuscripts. Instead, the conversations we cultivated throughout the School were characterised by epistemic humility, reflexivity and care.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tanu Biswas can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/in-the-pensive-pause-of-supervision-a-footnote-on-citing-santos/. About the post: Overcoming the separation of ethics, metaphysics (including ontology), epistemology, and aesthetics that is possible in Western philosophical traditions, but not in non-Western traditions, lies at the heart of scientific work aimed at cultivating decolonial methodologies.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Neslihan Sen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/from-candle-to-dilator-treating-vaginismus-in-turkey/. About the post: Vaginismus as a medical diagnosis, and its associated therapy, give women the legitimacy to experience their bodies and sexualities in a way that was not acceptable before the diagnosis. Sexuality becomes central in these women's lives. (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 Jennifer Foley can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/networks-of-knowledge-sharing-becoming-with-mushrooms-in-academia/. About the post: The experience of becoming with mushrooms and being a part of the Mushy Collective changed how I understand and engage with knowledge production. Knowledge is not a finite product waiting to be harvested for display or consumption.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Megan MacGregor can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/microbiome-monitoring-smart-toilets-precision-medicine-and-the-post-genomic-bowel/. About the post: Imagine that every time you poop, your hygiene routine involves depositing your used toilet paper into a toilet-side receptacle. As you wash your hands, the device mixes, processes, and extracts microbial DNA from your stool. It sequences the microbial DNA for a real-time readout of your microbiome (the microbial genomes from within your gut, or at least the ones that made it to your stool), automatically sending the information to a large-scale microbiome database that integrates it into its data, algorithms, and analytic programs. The program connects to an app on your phone, telling you that based on your personal version of a healthy microbiome, today your microbiome is looking a little low in the bacterial species Akkermansia municiphila and high in some risky metabolites (the molecular outputs of some of your gut microbes).

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Miriam Fahimi can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/can-a-data-center-sweat/. About the post: Heatwaves push data centers to their thermal limits. The continuous operation of their servers depends on energy- and water-intensive artificial cooling, with far-reaching yet still insufficiently understood consequences for both societal and environmental well-being. This contribution examines the meanings and implications of artificial cooling in data centers and asks whether a data center can, in its own way, learn how to sweat. (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 Mayline Strouk can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/fragile-followings-leaving-and-returning-to-the-ecological-field/. About the post: This piece calls for renewed attention to returning to ecological field sites to conduct long-term monitoring studies. In marine ornithology, seabird colony monitoring – often carried out over the course of a career – shapes scientific trajectories, but financial support for such work remains largely limited and confined in short-term projects. In the social sciences, researchers are also expected to spend extended periods in the field to truly know and “own” it – until they move on to other projects and sites, following new positions and funding schemes. Taking the case of a petrel monitoring program in Iceland and an STS PhD thesis following it, I draw attention to the fragility of fieldwork, caught between the expectations and needs to stay and return to the field, and the realities of the precariousness faced by both researchers and the seabird populations they study. (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 Javed Siddiqui, Abdul Nayeem, Ambika Tandon, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri, Isha Bhallamudi and Manju Goel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/platform-workers-organizing-diaries-messages-from-union-organizers-to-researchers/. About the post: Researchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternatives and strengthening movements, by speaking to three gig worker-organizers from India - Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed. We ask them, how do they view the role of researchers in the gig worker organizing landscape? How can researchers best support gig worker unions? What should we keep in mind when embarking on such collaborations? (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 Mpho Primus and Siri Lamoureaux can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/automating-language-losing-relationality-feminist-reflections-on-african-language-ai/. About the post: A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her response lies not only in the words she chooses, but in tone, shared history, relationships, context, and even silence. Yet these are precisely the elements that today's Large Language Models struggle to capture. As AI expands into African languages, the focus has largely been on datasets, benchmarks, and model performance. But what happens when language is transformed into decontextualised text for computational processing? Drawing on perspectives from computational linguistics and linguistic anthropology, this article argues that language is not simply a collection of words - it is a relational, embodied social practice. We examine how current approaches to African language AI risk reproducing older assumptions about language while overlooking the cultural and social worlds that give it meaning.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katharina Rynkiewich can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/the-hotspot-as-a-sociotechnical-and-political-object-frontline-healthcare-professionals-and-public-conversation-alongside-the-intensification-of-a-u-s-measles-outbreak/. About the post: The post examines the utility of the term "hotspots," used to identify spatial clusters of infectious diseases, by looking at how it is taken up in the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) and the practices of frontline healthcare professionals in South Florida. The author shows that hotspots are not just colloquial references to cases reported. Rather, they also signal the political and sociotechnical nature of epidemiological terms as they confront cultural contexts and public health infrastructure.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sumin Myung can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/stuck-among-the-trees/. About the post: In this second addition to our series on Stuckness, Sumin Myung shows how contemporary scientists have come to feel stuck about their work for an unlikely reason: scientific forestry's history of successfully replenishing the country's extensive mountain forests since the 1970s after decades of devastation under Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and postcolonial industrial development. For Myung's interlocutors, this “success” of earlier forest regeneration programs has ironically unsettled what missions and directions their field ought to pursue going forward. This post points to how stuckness can be understood as a symptom of the narratives that our interlocutors presume in their scientific and technological endeavors, such as the narrative of earlier loss and subsequent success.

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.