Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cheryl Hagan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/responsible-ai-in-action-beyond-policy-regimes/. About the post: Researchers at RAIL are acting in good faith and their research requires them to negotiate and make choices that result in both inclusion and exclusion. They are also making choices that have be...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katrina Nicole Matheson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/the-cyborg-is-dead-the-node-rises/. About the post: As social scientists, we can contribute to the creation of liberatory networks by shifting from investigations of embodied hybridity to examinations of nodality: why nodes connect and how they aut...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by A.R.E. Taylor can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/major-internet-outages-are-getting-bigger-and-occurring-more-often-a-reflection-on-the-crowdstrike-it-outage/. About the post: The CrowdStrike outage provided us with an eye-opening reminder of the vulnerabilities that arise from the centralization of comput...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Emery Vanderburgh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/disruptions-in-grace-embracing-mutation-and-disability-in-nature-through-art/. About the post: For disabled audiences, an artistic language that represents how we see our skills, barriers and bodies can help to unite us by updating our activism’s symbolo...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Amrita Kurian can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/01/thinking-with-epistemic-things-quality-and-its-consequences-in-agri-commodities-markets/. About the post: What happens when an "epistemic thing"—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rosario Rm can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/on-menstruation-and-feeling-shame/. About the post: Menstruation as a subject of study is not new. Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Bobel, Miren Guillo, and Karina Felitti, among many others, have discussed how menstruation has been related to specific practi...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Valerie Berseth can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/swimming-against-the-current-navigating-distrust-in-open-science/. About the post: In the effort to build trust in science, the complexities of distrust must be confronted. Open science practices alone are unlikely to address deeper issues of power and peo...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Matias Milia can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/commons-in-science-and-technology-dispatches-from-the-seekcommons-network/. About the post: As a distributed network of researchers, technologists, and environmental activists, we proposed, therefore, to shift the...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Henry Snow can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/work-together-eat-bread-together-stardew-valley-and-the-dream-of-the-commons/. About the post: “The Farm” is a saccharine settler colonialist homestead fantasy that legitimizes an industrial production process as dystopian as any. Perhaps the American gamer wan...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by PRATYUSHA KIRAN can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/underneath-it-all-unveiling-the-toxic-reality-of-fast-fashion-underwear-and-the-social-dimension-of-health/. About the post: The health concerns related to fast fashion primarily stem from chemicals in synthetic dyes and other low-quality raw materials use...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Maythe Han can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/dining-with-dogs-more-than-human-relations-in-food-media/. About the post: Human and nonhuman lives may have first become closely entangled with the rise of agriculture as we raised animals to eat, and other animals that could help u...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aikaterini Mitselou and Isabell Hedke can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/green-lady-cambodia-a-small-initiative-for-a-big-change-on-menstrual-health-and-hygiene-education/. About the post: Achieving menstrual health is crucial for attaining good health and well-being, ensuring quality education and promoti...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Guillermo Echauri can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-the-digital-divide-new-dimensions-of-digital-inequality/. About the post: From the emergence of the Web, through milestones such as the rise of mobile phones and social media, and up to the current hype around AI, the development, access...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Savannah Mandel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/trade-versus-academic-press-part-2-of-publishing-in-academia/. About the post: The decision between the two publishers was not simple. It was financial. It was personal. It was intellectual. It was also ideological.

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/2024/10/how-to-create-figurations-and-inhabit-feminist-sts-research-a-diy-manual/. About the post: This is a DIY manual for working with figurations to inhabit feminist STS research. The methodological proposal of figuration, as described by Haraway, places us once...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Savannah Mandel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/do-academics-need-agents-part-1-of-publishing-in-academia/. About the post: If you hope to someday publish with a trade press such as Penguin, Harper Collins, or Simon & Schuster, or are interested in having stronger public representation for your work or...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Matt Artz can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/brush-strokes-to-bytes-anthropological-praxis-in-business/. About the post: My research revealed how these digital platforms, despite their initial promise of democratizing the art world, often reinforced and even amplified the existing hierarchies and inequalit...

A podcast about making a podcast which is really just a conversation among two friends who used to be close friends, a long time ago. Transcript available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y8dOEXz7FEqWQEMPHHsH3EU0NFIlpTVx/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108539968411457483057&rtpof=true&sd=true Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/worrying-over-speaking-and-the-pretentiousness-of-pod...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Iván Flores can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/10/chaotic-oscillation-understanding-the-paradoxical-presence-of-video-games-in-contemporary-society/. About the post: Common sense tells us that play and work are opposing categories. However, in our society, we often encounter situations where the boundaries be...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by María Fernanda Lartigue Marín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/critical-metals-magic-tricks-and-energy-transition-a-social-biography-of-lithium/. About the post: By exploring lithium's social biography, I hope to offer an example of ways in which anthropology can interrogate the magic tricks and technofi...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cody Skahan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/geoengineering-de-facto-environmental-governance-and-alternative-future-making/. About the post: In the absence of an appropriate governing institution, de facto governance (i.e., governance that does not proceed through “proper” channels) of geoengineering ha...

Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration chronicles the author’s journey as a scholar and a young woman working in the commercial space industry in the US. It also talks about the difficulties of gaining access to certain technical field sites. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/space-anthropology-with-savannah-mandel/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Beatriz Klimeck can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/from-a-hashtag-to-the-right-for-indoor-air-quality-a-short-story-of-the-covidisairborne-movement/. About the post: Isolated during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to follow on Twitter (social media platform now called X) a few scientists...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/foucault-dialectics-and-randomized-clinical-trials-bridges-between-medicine-and-anthropology/. About the post: I hope that other scientists understand anthropology, but at the same time, it’s essential that anthropology also enters other spaces an...

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/2024/08/from-foraging-to-keeping-bees-in-northeast-brazil/. About the post: For Rogério and other meleiros, greater awareness of the environmental impact of their foraging practices developed  through their transition from meleiro to apicultor (apiarist or beekee...