Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

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 ope...

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, embo...

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 commu...

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...

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...

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 spa...

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 o...

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...

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 Rau...

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...

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...

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 be...

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 t...

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 b...

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 pr...

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,...

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 episo...

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 fo...

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,...

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...

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. B...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Thomson Chakramakkil can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/seeing-acting-believing-the-cyberknife-and-the-transformation-of-medical-imaging/. About the post: One cannot help but be convinced that this is what medical salvation looks like. In some respects, I am already a believer. In May 2025, a month after r...

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

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Valeria Sánchez-Prieto can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/animals-in-war-multispecies-agency-and-the-memory-of-the-colombian-armed-conflict/. About the post: In one testimony from Colombia’s armed conflict, a parrot named Lola repeated the phrases she heard around her: “Paraco asesino” (“paramilitary murde...