Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Marie Comuzzo can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/listening-with-whales-song-grief-and-obligation-across-ways-of-knowing/. About the post: Who do we listen with and who do we recognize as meaningful producers of culture? Listening with Whales is a digital commons that brings scientific, artistic, musical, a...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Huntington can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/my-unemployment-in-the-time-of-ai/. About the post: AI has widened the liminal space of unemployment, and the “limitless” capability of AI job-seeking tools has also exploded. This all felt like putting out a fire with a bucket of fire—and finding my way o...

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 al...

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...

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 fert...

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...

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...

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 tearfull...

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 a...

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 i...

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 t...

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 c...

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 s...

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...

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...

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 gam...

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. Educa...

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 “...

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 t...

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. S...

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 p...

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...

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 conseque...

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 – ofte...

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 participa...