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 Chen Shen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/the-lung-tumor-we-know-exists-yet-that-we-cannot-see/. About the post: “The lung tumor we know exists yet that we cannot see” is a found footage essay film that assembles publicly available medical materials and original footage to explore how lung cancer is rendered visible—and remains invisible—through clinical regimes, and to reflect on how visibility operates as an epistemic practice that might be mobilized otherwise.
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Daniela Manica and Fabiene Gama can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/what-not-to-do-if-you-are-accused-of-harassment-the-case-of-boaventura-de-souza-santos/. About the post: In this text, we intend to revisit the well-known case of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, following its unfolding since the accusations that surfaced after the publication of this book "Sexual Misconduct in Academia" in 2023. We summarize the main events since then, focusing on developing a counter-manual that didactically organizes the regrettable way in which the intellectual responded to the accusations and systematically retaliated against the victims. (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 Marilou Polymeropoulou can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/from-the-grid-to-the-field-visualizing-the-chipscene/. About the post: I was introduced to chipmusic and its scene: online communities, netlabels, visual performers, musicians and sound artists, a whole network of creatives which would often physically materializse in events across the world, such as Error Code. That night I returned home and went straight online on my computer to catch a glimpse of the chipscene: 8-bit graphics and sounds flooded my brain and I started wondering what does the chipscene world look like – both online and offline. Years later, I recognizsed the feeling of wanting to explore the digital social in Flynn’s words: what does the chipscene ‘grid’ look like and how can I get in?
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Renee Yu Jin can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/touch-to-make-an-index-fingers-path-into-the-sculpture-factories-in-china/. About the post: How do digital platforms reconfigure the ways we come to know sites of artistic labor before we ever enter the workshops? What began as a simple search for sculpture factories near Beijing became an encounter with how algorithmic recommendation, platform aesthetics, and factory self-promotion organize visibility for contemporary sculpture production. As clips foreground technological capability and optimized workflows while workers remain partially obscured, a layered form of mediation emerges, one that frames the factory as a digital formation long before it becomes a physical place. Tracing how my own scrolling shaped this encounter, this piece examines how touch, vision, and labor move across screens and shop floors, revealing how digital circulation both illuminates and abstracts the embodied work of sculpture making in China.
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 coexisted and have a love-hate relationship. Daily connected, their bodies inhabiting poorly demarcated boundaries between online and the offline. (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 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 gravitating towards entrepreneurial spaces. Exploring how progressive actors are narrating their entrepreneurial aspirations as a way to access resources to address global-scale environmental concerns, this piece explores how new progressive narratives are rehabilitating the concept of shareholder value without any meaningful structural challenges to shareholder primacy.
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, "It goes against the residential function of housing and public norms." But in reality, the state is under-invested in accessible, meaningful funerary alternatives that are low in price. Bone ash apartments therefore are a private solution to a public infrastructure failure—a way for people to stay connected to their dead in a system that has prioritized efficiency over intimacy. (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 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 Dmitry notes in his account of regular switching between being part of the global expanse and pursuing his everyday responsibilities, they practice scaling, whilst staying attuned to the incommensurability between a small home and the huge outer space. (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 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 chapter of the Labor Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers’ voices, supporting unionisation efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers’ organizing.
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 like a llama —the most essential animal for life in the Andes. What might be seen as void, then, can reveal as much as, or even more than, the brightest star. This brief text reflects on the relevance of attending to those spaces, moments, and situations that remain undigitized in order to understand the social role of digital technologies and how they shape our lives. Much like the dark voids that give form to Andean constellations, these intervals can illuminate dimensions of existence that are otherwise overshadowed by the glow of the screens. (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 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 not about becoming a science or rebating the epithets of pseudo-science. Instead, “being with science”, “not being a non-science”, or “helping science” are the signifiers that circulate. (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 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 and instead reinforce morally conservative values related to motherhood, gender, and gestation? (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 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 expertise, allocation of credit, and the complexities of embodied knowledge in collaborative anthropological research.
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 “franken-food.” Rather than marking genetically modified crops as inherently monstrous, the modifier highlights the responsibility of agritech creators, the ‘Frankensteins’ who engineer and deploy the technology.
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?
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