Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Hui Wen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/i-just-want-to-be-happy-singing-scrolling-and-healing-in-a-chinese-seniors-digital-life/. About the post: Like many older adults in China, Auntie Zhang has found her own way into the digital world. Her fascination with short videos is not about escaping reality, b...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Eric Orlowski and Juan Forero-Duarte can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/excavating-cosmotechnical-diversity-in-colombia-and-sweden/. About the post: "Excavating" Cosmotechnical Diversity in Colombia and Sweden offers an ethnographic comparative study of metaphorical Silicon Valley's within local contexts o...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/simulating-systemic-violence-game-design-as-speculative-ethnography-in-seven-days-of-destruction/. About the post: “Seven Days of Destruction” is a speculative game that confronts the structural logics of gun violence in the U.S.—poverty, miseducation,...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Kate Zogaj can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/smart-wallets-and-the-shifting-boundaries-of-trust-in-decentralized-finance/. About the post: This article explores how smart wallets not only reflect changing technological norms but also reveal deeper social and political dynamics. Drawing on themes of delega...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elexis Williams Gray can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/submarine-cyborgs-at-sea-with-haraway-and-jue/. About the post: The history of human relations with the Earth’s oceans and seas is an old one, set back into deep time. As long as humans have been living by the shores of this planet, we have found ours...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Vivette García-Deister can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/sts-academic-publishing-as-a-work-of-service-and-hope-a-conversation-with-vivette-garcia-deister/. About the post: I believe that my job as an editor is to encourage conversations and foster a dialogue between different epistemic traditions. To achi...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Julián Medina-Zárate and Nicolas Lara-Rodriguez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/peasant-reserve-zones-as-techno-socio-environmental-assemblages/. About the post: Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories histor...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiên-Dung Hà can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/homecoming-tasting-death-in-a-vietnamese-forensic-laboratory/. About the post: This sacred obligation to the dead allows the Vietnamese forensic scientists and technicians to think beyond the dichotomies of martyr/non-martyr, or North/South Vietnamese. A high...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katie Ulrich can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/the-sugar-library/. About the post: The making of the online sugar library has unfolded amid growing discussions around Open Science, increasing concerns about AI training on stolen materials accessed online, and in the context of anthropology’s fraught histo...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Gregory can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/the-porosity-of-promise-metal-organic-frameworks-mofs-and-the-new-science-of-technofixation/. About the post: Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscient...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Arielle Milkman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/what-if-weve-been-thinking-about-wildfire-smoke-the-wrong-way/. About the post: Wildfire smoke toxicity is linked with multisystemic adverse health effects. Scientists are increasingly studying wildfire health impacts beyond respiratory and cardiovascular...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elie Danziger can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/the-ecosystem-multiple-navigating-the-transatlantic-fate-of-biosphere-1-%c2%bd/. About the post: Experimental "ecosystems" emerge from the relation between facilities. The DSE case shows how ecosystems are defined relationally, not only through interoperabil...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Neiman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/its-like-youre-welcome-love-science-on-doing-critical-anthropology-when-the-enterprise-is-under-attack/. About the post: Should we refrain from kicking science when it is down? Ought the level of our critique be calibrated by how vulnerable the scientific ent...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Hannah Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/laughter-and-dreaming-of-wins-in-recovery/. About the post: At Alliance Wellness, I also noticed how young Somali American men turn to humor and laughter to socialize experiences of sobriety or resist the structure and authority of Alcoholics Anonymous discours...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Andrew Wiebe can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/toward-a-linked-data-approach-to-shifting-identities-and-null-values-in-data-sets/. About the post: Acknowledging shifting identities and embracing NULL values complicates data analysis but can ultimately produce more accurate and respectful records.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes and Felipe Figueiredo can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/data-centers-transnational-collaborations-and-the-differing-meanings-of-connection/. About the post: As anthropologists researching data centers, one of our goals is to point to a deeper timeline of events that have given...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jiwon Kim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/from-bin-to-bank-recycling-household-waste-in-urban-indonesia/. About the post: Environmental activists and industry professionals were hesitant to view them more than “housewives’ plaything (main-mainan).” The quantity of waste banks’ contribution to handling h...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sebastian Zarate can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/who-will-protect-andean-potatoes-in-the-near-future-uncertainties-about-the-next-generation-of-native-potato-conservationists/. About the post: While potato farmers have been referred to as “guardians” of agrobiodiversity, little attention has been brough...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Allie E.S. Wist can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/bodies-as-proxies-or-the-stratigraphic-evidence-of-our-appetites-at-metabolic-scales-from-the-human-to-the-planetary-on-the-occasion-of-the-anthropocenes-ongoing-debate-about-itself/. About the post: In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible roc...

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/2025/04/witnessing-the-porous-world/. About the post: This blog series emerges from porous interventions at the intersections of environmental humanities and science and technology studies whereby scientized objects are opened to the world they animate through et...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Virendra Mathur and Aarjav Chauhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/following-primates/. About the post: If the langurs moved to the agricultural fields or crossed the village, no data could be collected for a couple hours or more. In those moments, we would either wait, patiently hoping that the langurs...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Brittany Fields can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/the-limits-of-identity-how-race-and-gender-constructs-in-biometric-technology-narrow-who-we-are/. About the post: Identification through technologically assisted vision is therefore not revolutionary or transformative; instead, it perpetually sees others a...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda and nicolás gaitán-albarracín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/experimental-methodologies-for-listening-to-the-present-an-interview-with-alejandra-osejo-varona/. About the post: Feminist critiques and environmental anthropology explore the human and the non-human as...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elif Memis can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/the-politics-of-civic-education/. About the post: Educational institutions promote civic education through various simulations, to inform communities about democracy and citizenship. Although such practices indeed increase society’s knowledge in civics, the abs...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Yifan Xia can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/what-are-walking-simulators-ethnographically/. About the post: “Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the preva...