Claim OwnershipPlatypod, The CASTAC Podcast
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Platypod is the official podcast of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. We talk about anthropology, STS, and all things tech. Tune in for conversations with researchers and experts on how technology is shaping our world. (Jingle by chimerical. CC BY-NC 4.0)
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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 to Gabrielle Hecht provocation and inspired by Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, the author discusses how death, deadly conditions and deadly materiality of pores excludes lower caste and class temporary workers, and residents at Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill, Andhra Pradesh, India. Here people make life and living in deadly conditions of engineered porosity.
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, by contrast, a similar function is exported to technologies of access control and credentialing. One of the central artefacts that exercises elements of both is the lanyard. Unlike the laminated ID alone, the lanyard presents a constellation of belonging all at once and, unlike the uniform, its lightweight profile and compact size allow more individual expression through clothing. In contrast to the social subtleties of the lanyard, I present a simple tool for physical security: the bollard. These metal poles offer a catastrophic resolution for problems of permission to access a space.
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 my origins. I bring up those questions today in my anthropological research. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)
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 argues that it represents a form of digital colonialism, where the compression of diverse, culturally significant creative tools into a single device reflects a historical pattern of devaluing cultural heritage in the name of a standardized vision of innovation.
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 “potentiality” — visions of life that could and should be (Taussig et al., 2013). This post offers a historical glimpse into how information technologies—and the sociopolitical anticipation of their potential impacts—produced embodied forms of futurity in the context of reform-era China, shaping intellectual and popular practices around humans’ bodily sensory and cognitive capacities as sites of optimization and enhancement. I highlight two case studies in which historical actors in 1980s China imagined human bodies as information storage, sensors, and transmitters. In doing so, this post asks what it means to feel, sense, and be with information as the boundaries between nature and culture, the biological and technological, human and machine
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 have different textures, grit, coarseness, porosity, specialization, various parent materials, as well as different memories...if soils are complex living organisms, then perhaps they can be considered to have a body. If soils have a body, then how does my human body collaborate with the soil’s body?
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 that such an examination can reveal an affective network shared between scientists and their environment, which is essential for understanding how the relationships necessary for research are produced and sustained. This is especially relevant for those of us interested in understanding the geopolitics of scientific knowledge in situated contexts, particularly within regions of the Global South.
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 youth soccer has come to emphasize spontaneity, inclusion, and teamwork (Bachner, 2023). Over time, these amateur ideals have been woven into a broader political agenda in which youth sport is understood as a vehicle for public health, social integration and the cultivation of social capital (Doherty et al., 2013; Ekholm, 2018). I hadn’t really perceived the problematic nature of these notions of fun and its broader political framework until I started working as a translator for the digital coaching app Supercoach, in 2018. Developed from the talent development methodology of IF Brommapojkarna –Sweden’s most prolific soccer academy– Supercoach aimed to improve grassroots clubs through structured content and a clear pedagogical pr (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)
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 an anthropology student, my focus has shifted to how the sensory experience of Chiquita Canyon is interpreted, classified, regulated and elusive to regulatory agencies, community members and landfill operators and how these experiences come into conflict. Community members can use odor complaints filed through regulatory agencies to argue the case that the landfill is causing harm. These odor complaints, however, are highly contested by landfill operators as it is difficult to prove that odors are coming from the landfill as opposed to another source.
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 with great joy and enthusiasm that we present this series of four posts written by Brazilian feminist anthropologists and intended for academic readers specializing in STS, as well as for readers in broader feminist networks and activist/grassroots communities. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)
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: to support producers to expand sustainable agricultural practices and access to related markets. We are still waiting for the USDA’s decision on what I call Project A version 2.0. In this post, I examine the dynamics of transdisciplinary agricultural research in the context of recent, stark changes in political priorities. I consider the mobilization of the term “underserved producers” to shape research objectives and activities through processes of translation from government policy priorities to grant proposals and participant-recruitment efforts.
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 almost all of Bangladesh (Hameed et al. 2000; Ramanathan and Raman 2005). This regional assessment too requires the mediation of human-made science that seeks to quantify the effects of materials in the air inhaled by breathing bodies. However, in popular discourse the air pollution problem in the Indo-Gangetic Plain remains a largely urban issue. My intent then is to interrogate how Delhi became a hawaalat since 2014, a city that seemingly encloses air in popular imagination, and not lose sight of the slippery and ephemeral planetary circulations of air. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)
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 collaboration that enabled urban survival in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paying attention to provisional and patchworked modes of response, and offering a partial yet grounded view, created a critical vantage point to examine the evolution of digital platformisation through different phases of the pandemic and beyond. Auto-ethnographic curiosities about the normalization of digital platforms for accessing necessities during the pandemic led me to ask what exactly was being platformised.
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 resonances with the AI industry he studies. He argues that Burning Man’s unique environment and otherworldly experiences can help us think about the AI industry’s aspirations for civilizational transformation.
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 technologies always also bring with them novel ways of imagining material relationships—of ownership, use, and control. To stay with such possibilities would entail not just denouncing health wearables altogether or aspiring toward a technology-free past, but would allow us to locate different ways that the trajectory of wearables might be changed to emphasize new relations of governance and self-determination.
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, but her way of engaging with reality and making sense of it. When she scrolls, sings along, and lip-syncs, she holds onto her core values that life has often shaken but not erased. The sentimental ballads drifting through these online videos give shape to frustrations and bafflement that rarely find words. Although dismissed by outsiders as shallow or “tacky,” these short clips offer their creators something that lingers beyond fleeting internet trends: a way to reconcile with the past, to momentarily soften its sharp edges, and to craft a version of life that feels both bearable and expressive. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)
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 of Sweden and Columbia using Yuk Hui's (2017) cosmotechnics as a conceptual framework.
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, addiction—not through realism but through allegory and constraint. Set in a surreal environment of surveillance and coercion, players navigate ethical compromise and systemic complicity. Designed in the wake of campus shootings, the game merges procedural rhetoric with speculative ethnography, asking: what if the unplayable conditions of real life could be felt, not just represented? This post reflects on game design as method and politics, where playing the system becomes a mode of critique.
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 delegated trust, infrastructure politics, and usability, it asks what kinds of financial agency are being enabled—or foreclosed—as DeFi (Decentralized Finance) tools move from niche platforms to mainstream adoption.
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 ourselves drawn to marine worlds and species, to the fluid enchantments of water, waves, salt, spray, submersion. However, it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to consider that the ocean itself has a history. Drawing on the insights of scholars who have traced transformations in human-ocean relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this piece opens a small window into my research examining the figuration of the midcentury scientific diver, considering representations of hybridity and cyborg embodiment witnessed in the “manfish” of Jacques Cousteau’s diving memoir The Silent World (1953), and a few relevant articulations (and critiques) of the submarine cyborg.
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