Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Irene do Planalto Chemin, Geovana Luna dos Santos, Kauan Alves da Silveira Aristides, Raylane Souza de Moura, Samara Lopes de Oliveira and Veronica Martins Da Silva can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/11/doing-research-between-adolescence-and-cyborgs/. About the post: Cyborgs and adolescence have historically...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sakari Mesimäki can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/11/renouncing-and-returning-to-shareholder-value/. About the post: Are global environmental problems most likely to be solved through businesses that operate at scale? As Finnish national politics have moved towards austerity measures, progressive causes are...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by xinyi wu can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/11/space-for-the-departed-bone-ash-apartments-as-an-alternative-to-cemeteries-in-urban-china/. About the post: The Bone Ash Apartments are at a grey zone of policy because turning residential units into burial sites is not allowed. As per the civil affairs official,...

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 Dmit...

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 cha...

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 lik...

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...

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 an...

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...

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 “frank...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 y...

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...

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 w...

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:...

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...

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 collab...

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...

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 tec...