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...

An incredible contribution by @loicriom.bsky.social and @taschn.bsky.social to our Forum on Tech Oligarchy. 🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Don't forget our latest call to join CASTAC!

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

📩[Calls & Applications] Contributions are invited for the edited volume “Theorizing Science Studies from Central and Eastern Europe”. Editors seek work that unsettles dominant categories through situated theorizing. ✍️Submit abstracts by March 31, 2026. +Info tapuya.org/category/calls-applications/

🔎 CASTAC is still seeking applications for the Public Relations Manager role, a key board member who supports our organisation by managing social media and email communications. 🌎 Open for everyone in the world: castac.org/cfa-public-r... 🗓️Final day to apply: February 26.

How do we facilitate meaningful conversations amongst researchers across disciplines? Anushree, Debopriya and Malcolm reflect and offer some answers from their own work where they deploy labor as a lens to think with labor movements and write collaboratively: blog.castac.org/2026/02/tran...

Do you want to get involved with CASTAC? This is your direct way to do so!

How do we facilitate meaningful conversations amongst researchers across disciplines? Anushree, Debopriya and Malcolm reflect and offer some answers from their own work where they deploy labor as a lens to think with labor movements and write collaboratively: blog.castac.org/2026/02/tran...

🔎 CASTAC is seeking applications for the Public Relations Manager role, a key board member who supports our organisation by managing social media and email communications. 🌎 Open for everyone in the world. Ready to apply? More information on the process: castac.org/cfa-public-r...

🔎 CASTAC is seeking applications for the Public Relations Manager role, a key board member who supports our organisation by managing social media and email communications. 🔍More information on the role and process here: castac.org/cfa-public-r... We invite you to apply!

❗️Happening tomorrow The latest installment of our #PhDInConversation event series features a discussion of PhD Student Nai Lee Kalema's research on the World Bank Group’s Global Digital Transformation initiative. 📺 Join us online at 5:30pm here: buff.ly/kUuh9Mr

Genealogies aren’t nostalgia, they’re accountability tools. Panel 2 asks how historical continuities can inform more critical approaches to data politics. Feb 18 uky.zoom.us/j/86848639105 #DataGovernance #STS

🔎 CASTAC is seeking applications for the Public Relations Manager role, a key board member who supports our organisation by managing social media and email communications. 🔍More information on the role and process here: castac.org/cfa-public-r... We invite you to apply!

The MAHA movement is skeptical of hormonal birth control, favoring a high-tech take on much older techniques of cycle tracking. Anthropology PhD student Anna Wood explores what's behind this rightward shift in reproductive discourse and women's health: blog.castac.org/2026/02/seed...

The MAHA movement is skeptical of hormonal birth control, favoring a high-tech take on much older techniques of cycle tracking. Anthropology PhD student Anna Wood explores what's behind this rightward shift in reproductive discourse and women's health: blog.castac.org/2026/02/seed...

Submission to open panels—Extended deadline for 4S Toronto 2026! Call closes Feb 9th 2026. You can submit here: www.xcdsystem.com/4sonline/abs...

How might we think of the role of culture, politics and history in writing with (and about) unions? Today on Platypus, Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome and Kaveri Medappa's post is the second in a series on the politics of writing about platform workers' organising. blog.castac.org/2026/01/writ...

We're excited for another year of anthropological and social thinking about science and technology! Today, we invite you once again to meet our wonderful new team of Contributing Editors who keep our blog alive: blog.castac.org/2026/01/plat... #STS

How might we think of the role of culture, politics and history in writing with (and about) unions? Today on Platypus, Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome and Kaveri Medappa's post is the second in a series on the politics of writing about platform workers' organising. blog.castac.org/2026/01/writ...

We're excited for another year of anthropological and social thinking about science and technology! Today, we invite you once again to meet our wonderful new team of Contributing Editors who keep our blog alive: blog.castac.org/2026/01/plat... #STS

As we look ahead to another engaging year of publishing a wide range of work from the social sciences on science and technology, we are thankful for the labor that our editorial team and our authors continue to put in. Today, we invite you to meet the 2026 team!🙌 blog.castac.org/2026/01/plat...

The Medical Anthropologists & Social Scientists in Health (MASSH) TIG is planning for our upcoming annual meeting in Albuquerque. To learn more about the MASSH TIG, visit appliedanthro.org/membership/t... #SfAA #SocialScience #Anthropology #AppliedAnthropology #SfAA2026 #MedicalAnthropology