Can anthropology's colonial legacies be reassembled on crip time? A new post on Platypus by Seon Shim traces disability anthropology as a practice of taking up space where and how it is not expected — arriving late, moving slowly, and building toward crip futures.

🎙️ New Platypod episode! Dr. Ana Carolina de Assis @anthrotechana.bsky.social talks with Dr. Luis Felipe R. Murillo about Common Circuits, his book on minor computing communities and the alternative futures they make possible against AI's enclosure of knowledge. 🎧 blog.castac.org/2026/06/plat...

Why study smell in clothes? A new RAFeCT post on Platypus explores smelling someone else's garments as a way of approaching absence, memory, and intimacy. blog.castac.org/2026/06/why-...

Today on Platypus, Şafak Kılıçtepe and Emine Onculer Yayalar explore the governance of bodies in Türkiye's hybrid medical landscape. blog.castac.org/2026/06/betw...

Today on #Platypus, Vageesh Vishnoi (@vageesh.bsky.social ) asks what ethnographic fieldwork looks like in a platform economy.

Today on #Platypus, Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes and Mandy Penney introduce Becoming-With Mushrooms, a Multispecies Collective Autoethnography for Reworlding Educational Environments.

Today on #Platypus, Prerna Gupta explores how India's first commercial nuclear plant turned early patriotic pride into generations of local precarity, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Maharashtra. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/a-pr...

Today on #Platypus, Nga Shi Yeu reflects on Malaysia's 1999 Nipah virus outbreak through the lens of his childhood and asks how a village sustains itself when its name becomes a global synonym for a zoonosis. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/vira...

Today on #Platypus, Leonardo Thibau presents a multimodal critical cartography of the "Canal do Búfalo" forum, tracing how Brazil's early manosphere used toponymic aliases to frame belonging, resentment, and masculinist truth-making online. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/cart...

Today on #Platypus, Aylar Abdolahzadeh traces what ancient campfire debris reveals about human resilience. From striking sparks to keeping a flame alive, fire is a learned skill, and archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals used it flexibly. Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/trac...

Today on #Platypus, Alejandro Cerón examines how epidemiologists navigate the tension between technical expertise and political objectives towards outbreak mitigation, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala and the enduring myth of John Snow. Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/outb...

Today on #Platypus, Cristian Gustavo Gutiérrez asks: are emerging biotechnologies transforming disability into something to be prevented, corrected, or eliminated?

Today on #Platypus, Ana Paula Perrota, @leodupin.bsky.social and Rosângela Cintrão explore how industrial sanitary norms render traditional food cultures illegal in Brazil, and what that reveals about whose knowledge counts in global food safety regimes Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/food...

Today on #Platypus, Debjani Chakraborty explores how mobile phone affordances are reappropriated across rural Indian contexts, sometimes as tools of navigation and aspiration, and at other times as mechanisms of surveillance and moral scrutiny. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/dome...

Starting in 20 minutes! We are ready to start the conversation of this year with Kalpana Shanker, David Nemer & Lilly Irani! follow this thread for the latest conversations on #CASPR2026!

Today on #Platypus, Clarissa Reche reflects on the vital work of building collective knowledge in Latin America. Through care, territory, and embodied knowledge, she asks why feminist anthropologists of science and technology weave networks. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/why-...

📣 The 2026 Call for Nominations is open — deadline June 1. Self-nominations welcome for the #DianaForsythePrize Check the requirements: castac.org/castac-award...

📣 Nominations open for the GAD Awards deadline July 1! 🏆 New Directions Award ($1,000): expanding anthropology in the 21st century 🏆 Cross-Field Award ($1,000): exemplary interdisciplinary peer-reviewed scholarship (last 3 years) Send nominations to [email protected] gad.americananthro.org/awards/

Today on #Platypus, @sanlambert.bsky.social introduces Citizen Technology — technologies that are governable by and for citizens — drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a makerspace in Barcelona's Sants neighborhood. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/intr...

Today on #Platypus, Kaitlyn Kathleen Rabach explores how homeowners in County Donegal, Ireland became experts in concrete chemistry and geoscience to counter their government's misdiagnosis - and fight for 100% redress for 30,000 crumbling homes. Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/beco...

Today on #Platypus, Nicole Ahoya examines how the "justice gap" is foregrounded and produced through data-driven approaches in international development - and asks whose knowledge and dreams count in re-imagining justice in Kenya and beyond. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/tech...

📣 The David Hakken Graduate Student Paper Prize is now accepting submissions! Recognizing innovative research at the intersection of anthropology and STS. Deadline: June 15, 2026. Self-submissions welcome. #CASTAC #Anthropology castac.org/castac-award...

Today on #Platypus, Jackie Ashkin, Alexander Foster, and Madeline Augusta Turner use salt as a provocation to think about the elemental as a matter of concern — from the Galápagos to the Dutch delta to Morocco. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/salt...

Today on #Platypus, Thomson Chakramakkil explores how the CyberKnife radiosurgery system transforms medical images into actionable data, writing from his own experience as a stage IV lung cancer patient, social scientist, and journalist. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/seei...

Today on #Platypus, Bronte Jones asks how reconceptualizing the human body as a holobiont might help us better attend to the relational, ecosystem nature of health and illness, from hookworm therapy to malaria's co-evolution with humans. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/micr...

🏆 The 2025 #DianaForsythePrize goes to Emily Yates-Doerr for Mal-Nutrition (UC Press). Honorable mention: Amy Zhang, Circular Ecologies (Stanford UP). 📣 The 2026 Call for Nominations is open: deadline June 1. Self-nominations welcome! castac.org/castac-award... #CASTAC #FeministAnthropology #STS

Today on #Platypus, Valeria Sánchez-Prieto asks how we can reconstruct the memory of the Colombian armed conflict by including animals that also experienced it: dogs, mules, parrots, insects, primates as companions, sentinels, and infrastructure of war. Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/anim...

📣 Join us for #CASPR2026 — CASTAC in the Spring! "Labor and Technoscientific Worlds: Historical Encounters and New Directions in the Field" — a roundtable with Kalpana Shankar, David Nemer & Lilly Irani honoring David Hakken. 📅 May 29 | 10:30AM–12:30PM CT 🎟️ Register: caspr2026.eventbrite.com

📣 Join us for #CASPR2026 — CASTAC in the Spring! "Labor and Technoscientific Worlds: Historical Encounters and New Directions in the Field" — a roundtable with Kalpana Shankar, David Nemer & Lilly Irani honoring David Hakken. 📅 May 29 | 10:30AM–12:30PM CT 🎟️ Register: caspr2026.eventbrite.com

Today on #Platypus, Christina Kefala explores how Chinese content creators use metrics to boost views and inform creative decisionmaking and what that reveals about creativity itself in an era of algorithmic platforms. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/maki...

Today on #Platypus, Mauricio Báez (he/they) explores what it means for an ethnographer of neuroscience labs to learn the same software the scientists use and what that reveals about how biological signals travel into art and creative ecosystems. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/what...

Today on #Platypus, Awa Diagne follows the scientific trajectories and historical struggles that shaped how we see and fail to see blood circulation. From Reference Man to John Henryism to Norman Bethune. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/04/bloo...

Today on #Platypus, Faridah Laffan explores why Victorian scholars renamed their field "Biblical Archaeology" and what a name can do for a discipline balancing rigor with public appeal. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/04/what...

Last week ok platypus! Check our latests post at: blog.castac.org

📣 Join us for #CASPR2026 — CASTAC in the Spring! "Labor and Technoscientific Worlds: Historical Encounters and New Directions in the Field" — a roundtable with Kalpana Shankar, David Nemer & Lilly Irani honoring David Hakken. 📅 May 29 | 10:30AM–12:30PM CT 🎟️ Register: caspr2026.eventbrite.com

Today on #Platypus, Adam Matthew Mikhail traces fish migrations, tidal rhythms, and electromagnetic sensing in the Strait of Gibraltar to examine sovereignty at sea. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/04/what...

Today on Platypus... Criminalizing commercial surrogacy doesn't eliminate exploitation, it reconfigures it. Ritu Ghosh analyzes how India's 'altruistic' surrogacy law shifts reproductive labor markets underground and heightens risk for surrogate workers. Read the post here: lnkd.in/djjFHgSb

Today on Platypus, Dr. Melissa Villa Nicholas revisits her 2023 book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants, exploring its cultural and political resonance as ICE raids intensify across the country (1/2)...

🔥 CALL FOR PAPERS: The Cultural Lives and Afterlives of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Data. I'm co-editing a Special Issue of Sexuality & Culture with Amin Ghaziani. 📝 Full details: link.springer.com/collections/hcbbadjbha #CfP #callforpapers #sexuality #gender #data

Today on Platypus, Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta, and Eesha Kunduri unpack how the gendered nature of platform work affects labour organizing in India and the opportunities for solidarity and forms of care that can emerge. Read to the complete post here: blog.castac.org/2026/04/gend...

How can an Africanist lens of “incompleteness” (Nyamnjoh2017) inform feminist visions of AI in Africa? This Platypus blog series brings together work on LLMs that calls for a “relational, multimodal, and community-centered AI” beyond “totalizing linguistic (1/2)

Today on Platypus, Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, and Pat Kinley introduce a special series on the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. The posts in this series critically examine how epidemiologic keywords are socialized among experts and the broader public.

Today on platypus, Misria Shaik Ali reflects on how as people against Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), Tamil Nadu endure the weight of an (un)resolved controversy...

Today on Platypus, Samiksha Bhan asks how precision becomes idealized and produced in AI-assisted diagnostics under uneven labor conditions that makes data workers in the global South vulnerable to harm and distress. Read and listen to the complete post here: blog.castac.org/2026/03/the-...

Today on Platypus Eva Steinberg asks how Mars Candy Corporations use of romance and the family shapes our understanding of plant breeding, genetics, and climate change. Read the complete post here: blog.castac.org/2026/03/love-a…

This week on platypus Meenakshi Mani shows that the everyday work of typically well-paid tech professionals—whether that be within specific domains like EdTech or within Big Tech—are by no means without frustration. Read and listen to the complete post: blog.castac.org/2026/03/engi...

What might we learn by studying science and technology through the lens of stuckness? Today on Platypus, Michelle Venetucci and Shoko Yamada introduce a new series, exploring stuckness as a way to draw out structural conditions and meaning-making amongst experts: blog.castac.org/2026/03/seri...

Today on Platypus, Rachel Lim explores how climate‑crisis ‘emergency’ rhetoric ignores colonial roots, urging us to confront racial capitalism and extractive violence: blog.castac.org/2026/02/ther... #STS

"What kinships & constellations come into view when we approach ethnography with an indifference to the boundedness of categories?" SCA Contributing Editor Poornima Rajeshwar interviews Naisargi N. Davé about her Gregory Bateson Prize winning book "Indifference."

A deadly, high-profile assault on a New Delhi bus in 2012 led to the installation of panic buttons on city's autorickshaws. Today on Platypus, William Stafford Jr. writes about the complex interplay of suspicion, affordance, and securitization that played out after. blog.castac.org/2026/02/a-pr...