Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Christina Kefala can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/making-for-the-feed-creativity-platforms-and-visibility-in-china/. About the post: In China, creative production is immediately embedded within circuits of monetization and visibility. Content can move seamlessly from aesthetic expression to commercial tr...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mauricio Baez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/what-would-happen-if-ethnographers-learned-to-process-signals/. About the post: In this piece, I use software typically employed for sound synthesis and real-time audiovisual composition, which allows sounds to be created and shaped digitally, often in conne...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Awa Diagne can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/blood-circulation-opening-up-a-closed-system/. About the post: But, blood has never been a single, unified fluid. Among blood’s several components—red blood cells, plasma, platelets—not all have the same exact velocity. When I began developing my dissertation p...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Faridah Laffan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/whats-in-a-name/. About the post: In 1870, Samuel Birch, respected Egyptologist at the British Museum, wished to form a society aimed at understanding the ancient near eastern world through its cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts. Similar organizations had exi...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Adam Matthew Mikhail can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/what-the-map-conceals-sovereignty-and-the-sea-in-the-strait-of-gibraltar/. About the post: Sovereignty at sea does not work the way maps suggest. The Strait of Gibraltar is not a line, it is a volume with depth, surface, and air. Its currents run in o...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ritu Ghosh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/criminality-risk-and-labor-altruistic-surrogacy-in-contemporary-india/. About the post: By criminalizing surrogate workers’ right to economic compensation for their biomedically intensive, risky, intimate labor, the state refuses to recognize them as workers, p...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Melissa Villa Nicholas can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/data-borders-three-years-later/. About the post: People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (2023 UC Press), which examines the growing indust...

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

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Alena Thiel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/techno-ethics-and-feminist-ai-what-role-for-an-african-studies-approach-to-science-and-technology/. About the post: As Francis Nyamnjoh reminds us, both “[b]odies and forms are never complete; they are open-ended malleable vessels to be appropriated by conscio...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich and Pat Kinley can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/from-hotspots-to-outbreaks-keywords-for-ungrounding-space-temporality-and-the-boundaries-of-infection/. About the post: This series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analyti...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Misria Shaik Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/on-resolving-controversies-enduring-regulatory-neglect-in-southern-tamil-nadu/. About the post: This post addresses how the controversy around the Kudankulam nuclear power Plant is being resolved, nearly 15 years after the 2011 protest where around 9000 p...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Samiksha Bhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/the-human-cost-of-precision/. About the post: The use of AI tools in diagnostics claims to shorten the long and exhausting "diagnostic odyssey" of people with rare diseases. As a result, AI-assisted diagnostics is being framed as a 'disruptive technology' ab...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Eva Steinberg can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/love-at-first-sprout-wild-peanuts-and-mars-plan-for-climate-security/. About the post: Despite the toxicity and the chromosome doubling and the botanical reality of peanut reproduction, Mars’s portrayal of peanut breeding as an all-natural gendered family un...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Meenakshi Mani can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/engineering-through-stuckness/. About the post: In this first addition to our series on Stuckness, Meenakshi Mani shows that the everyday work of typically well-paid tech professionals—whether that be within specific domains like EdTech or within Big Tech—a...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jonathan Givan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/hip-hop-sampling-and-the-akai-mpc-as-a-platform-for-spatiotemporal-discourse/. About the post: This analysis moves away from exploring Hip Hop as a particular Black political action taking sonic form and towards an ontology of Black American Hip Hop product...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Michelle Venetucci and Shoko Yamada can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/series-theorizing-stuckness-in-science-and-technology/. About the post: What might we learn by studying science and technology through the lens of stuckness? Scientific and technological practice has long been associated with notions of...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rachel Lim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/there-is-a-climate-emergency-and-its-called-colonialism/. About the post: In this piece, author and artivist Rachel Lim highlights how the climate crisis is not a sudden "emergency" but the cumulative result of centuries of colonial dispossession and extraction...

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

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Malcolm Katrak, Anushree Gupta and Debopriya Shome can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/transnational-translations-an-interdisciplinary-dialogue-on-platforms-and-labor/. About the post: This post is an Interdisciplinary dialog on platforms and labor. We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with g...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Wood can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/seed-cycling-toward-a-crossroads-menstrual-positivity-and-hormone-practices-under-right-wing-regimes/. About the post: A constellation of women’s health advocates, right-wing influencers, and lay experts have helped to proliferate negative information around hor...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome and Kaveri Medappa can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/01/writing-about-with-platform-unions-the-role-of-culture-politics-and-history/. About the post: Platform work has exposed larger numbers of workers, especially younger workers with little memory or experience of organising,...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Chen Shen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/the-lung-tumor-we-know-exists-yet-that-we-cannot-see/. About the post: “The lung tumor we know exists yet that we cannot see” is a found footage essay film that assembles publicly available medical materials and original footage to explore how lung cancer is ren...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Daniela Manica and Fabiene Gama can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/what-not-to-do-if-you-are-accused-of-harassment-the-case-of-boaventura-de-souza-santos/. About the post: In this text, we intend to revisit the well-known case of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, following its unfoldin...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Marilou Polymeropoulou can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/from-the-grid-to-the-field-visualizing-the-chipscene/. About the post: I was introduced to chipmusic and its scene: online communities, netlabels, visual performers, musicians and sound artists, a whole network of creatives which would often physica...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Renee Yu Jin can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/touch-to-make-an-index-fingers-path-into-the-sculpture-factories-in-china/. About the post: How do digital platforms reconfigure the ways we come to know sites of artistic labor before we ever enter the workshops? What began as a simple search for sculpture f...