Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/03/recipes-of-resistance-global-digital-gastrosolidarity-for-palestine/. About the post: In this essay, the author weaves together insights on Palestinian foodways with their past ruminations on digital food, its related activism, and how these flouri...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Fei Yuan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/03/bed-time-storytelling/. About the post: Memories, hallucinations, and unfulfilled dreams are narrated from the bed during the final chapters of life. I seek to highlight the experiences of those in the hospice ward who, despite being confined to their beds, are a...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lea Happ can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/03/who-knows-about-ethical-research-reflections-on-research-ethics-and-vulnerability-in-abortion-research/. About the post: As a feminist researcher, I have found it at times difficult to navigate the complex nexus of agency and vulnerability. Ultimately, for me, do...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jacob Weger can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/02/anthropology-sts-and-the-politics-of-imagination-in-navigating-socio-environmental-change/. About the post: Imagination is a critical resource in the pursuit of sustainable futures, yet it is often constrained by powerful structural forces and vested interests...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by sebastian levar spivey can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/02/lonely-planet-looking-for-connection-citizen-science-seti-research-at-nasa/. About the post: The stakes here are cosmic and immediate: who are humans in extraterran (not yet extraterrestrial) relationships, and what becomes of the Earth when it exis...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Kimberly Sanchez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/01/water-scarcity-hydropolitics-and-the-importance-of-materiality-at-the-foothills-of-the-rocky-mountains/. About the post: As one of many in a very visible, linear collective, surface waters and irrigation infrastructures like canals, dams, and reservoirs f...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Renzo Taddei can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/12/milei-crowds-and-concrete-waves-in-argentina/. About the post: Thousands of individuals were now one massive block moving up and down. The stands shook. I felt the largest reinforced concrete stand in the largest soccer stadium in South America tremble beneat...

In this special episode, we revisit the 2023 edition of CASPR: CASTAC in the Spring, an annual online event held by CASTAC. This year, guest speakers convened to discuss the topic of "digital ethnography." Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2023/12/platypod-episode-eight-caspr-2023/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ziya Kaya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/algorithmic-imaginations-in-agriculture-automation/. About the post: Agricultural digitization not only sparks the imagination of humans being replaced by automation and data but also creates participatory models in corporate settings that aim to incorporate far...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lucas Nishida can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/high-costs-entangled-politics-what-all-comes-inside-a-medications-packaging/. About the post: In this process, the medication is not merely a chemical compound but is a product of and produces a network of relationships: with clinical trials and research res...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Madhura Rao can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/belly-versus-bin-how-digital-autoethnography-brought-me-back-from-the-brink-of-disordered-eating/. About the post: I had become adept at ignoring rancid smells and increasingly comfortable with cutting off mouldy bits before consuming a visibly deteriorating p...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rebecca Carlson, Heikki Wilenius and Jonathan Corliss can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/on-algorithmic-divination/. About the post: Algorithms are tools of divination. Like cowry shells, scapular bones or spiders trapped under a pot, algorithms are marshaled to detect and relay invisible patterns; to brin...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Adwaita Banerjee can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/plastic-chronicles-navigating-mumbais-material-mazes/. About the post: It is here, amidst a sea of discarded materials, that a relationship evolves—one between the waste pickers, the myriad forms of plastics, and the urban space that surrounds them. This...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Manon Lefevre can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/funeral-for-an-embryo/. About the post: Not long ago, it seemed that the science lab and the Catholic cemetery were two distinct worlds. Yet, surprising discursive and material connections complicate that dominant narrative. Rather, I found that the two side...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Gabrielle Hanley-Mott can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/how-to-imagine-the-unknown-choosing-an-arm-prosthesis/. About the post: An important cause of anxiety for her was how to choose a prosthetic and which one to choose. According to her, during one appointment, her doctor gave her a prosthetics catalog...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sophie Katz can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/staring-contest/. About the post: In the ICU, I watch my patients closely with my eyes, my hands, my machines. The more carefully I monitor them, the more keenly I feel myself being watched by a gaze I ultimately cannot return. And am I not gazing at the patie...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Muneezay Jaffery can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/the-wild-pantry/. About the post: The project we are working on is Plant Planet Plate, which brings together the work of the Green Shoots Foundation, which is led by me (a geographer), in rural development and agriculture with the research and skills in p...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sandra Avila and Marisol Marini can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/the-day-i-discovered-i-was-collaborating-on-a-eugenics-project-on-imponderables-in-collaborative-research/. About the post: One day Avila realized that the recommendation she had received from the dermatologist to exclude samples of fingern...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Patrick Kho can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/making-companion-species-at-a-robotics-lab/. About the post: Approaching robots as companion species, we find the significance of storytelling in robot experiments. We find that science fiction fundamentally shapes the research questions asked, while research...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Maggie Mang can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/blooming-biomes-mean-blooming-profits-nature-based-industrial-farming-and-the-politics-of-the-industrial-animal-microbiome/. About the post: This blog post details how hype, imaginations, and promises over the industrial animal microbiome circulate in industri...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/ai-as-a-feminist-issue/. About the post: For this episode, we'll read a story written earlier this year. This is a story about the public funding of artificial intelligence in the US and how that's a feminist issue. We asked aman agah, a schola...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Zhang can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/female-truck-drivers-in-china-navigate-gender-norms-on-douyin/. About the post: Over the course of a month, I examined the content of four popular female truck drivers on the platform. I explored how their efforts to change the narrative of truck driving and em...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nick Surawy Stepney and Nishanth Kunnukattil Shaji can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/between-pain-and-relief-morphines-ambiguities-in-india/. About the post: Morphine, the gold standard of medically prescribed painkillers, offers a troubling medical story, evoking in equal measure the contingent histories...

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/2023/08/madam-cistern/. About the post: It’s been a long time since someone has fetched water from me. I’m old now, dried up… it rained a lot this winter, but I am no longer able to hold on to the rain that falls. My time has come to an end… (This episode is avai...

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Colin Garon can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/fake-real-real-fake-salvarsan-on-the-us-medical-market/. About the post: Who could claim medical expertise? Should healers be allowed to advertise? What cures should laypeople be able to purchase for themselves? In the case of Salvarsan, the complex interplay...