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 Naijia Liu can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/can-you-hear-me-now-listening-in-chinas-romance-simulation-games/. About the post: Chinese romance games are built to make players feel heard, and the studios behind them promise the same. Drawing on fieldwork among players of China's female-oriented mobile games, this piece follows listening as it slips from a designed intimacy into a demand players make on the companies, and on the worlds these games represent.
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Manar Naser can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/the-kids-are-ai-right/. About the post: My students were actively evaluating AI's role and utility rather than absorbing it uncritically. This complicates the assumption that children are passive recipients of a technological future being built for them. Education policy is actively being shaped by the potential of an education in and conducted by AI rather than considering the students they are pushing this upon
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lachlan Hensey can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/dispatch-from-seoul-reflections-on-the-science-technology-human-values-science-and-technology-studies-school-june-2026/. About the post: In June, emerging STS scholars gathered in Seoul to workshop draft manuscripts, encountering charismatic objects and a “concrete fish tank”. In this post, Lachlan Hensey reflects on the 2026 ST&HV STS School: It seems many of us happened upon STS quite unexpectedly, but also gratefully, hesitantly or far later than we
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tanu Biswas can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/in-the-pensive-pause-of-supervision-a-footnote-on-citing-santos/. About the post: Overcoming the separation of ethics, metaphysics (including ontology), epistemology, and aesthetics that is possible in Western philosophical traditions, but not in non-Western traditions, lies at the heart of scientific work aimed at cultivating decolonial methodologies.
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Neslihan Sen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/from-candle-to-dilator-treating-vaginismus-in-turkey/. About the post: Vaginismus as a medical diagnosis, and its associated therapy, give women the legitimacy to experience their bodies and sexualities in a way that was not acceptable before the diagnosis. Sexuality becomes central in these women’s lives. (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 Jennifer Foley can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/networks-of-knowledge-sharing-becoming-with-mushrooms-in-academia/. About the post: The experience of becoming with mushrooms and being a part of the Mushy Collective changed how I understand and engage with knowledge production. Knowledge is not a finite product waiting to be harvested for display or consumption.
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Megan MacGregor can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/microbiome-monitoring-smart-toilets-precision-medicine-and-the-post-genomic-bowel/. About the post: Imagine that every time you poop, your hygiene routine involves depositing your used toilet paper into a toilet-side receptacle. As you wash your hands, the device mixes, processes, and extracts microbial DNA from your stool. It sequences the microbial DNA for a real-time readout of your microbiome (the microbial genomes from within your gut, or at least
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Miriam Fahimi can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/can-a-data-center-sweat/. About the post: Heatwaves push data centers to their thermal limits. The continuous operation of their servers depends on energy- and water-intensive artificial cooling, with far-reaching yet still insufficiently understood consequences for both societal and environmental well-being. This contribution examines the meanings and implications of artificial cooling in data centers and asks whether a data center can, in its own way,
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mayline Strouk can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/fragile-followings-leaving-and-returning-to-the-ecological-field/. About the post: This piece calls for renewed attention to returning to ecological field sites to conduct long-term monitoring studies. In marine ornithology, seabird colony monitoring – often carried out over the course of a career – shapes scientific trajectories, but financial support for such work remains largely limited and confined in short-term projects. In the social sciences, res
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Javed Siddiqui, Abdul Nayeem, Ambika Tandon, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri, Isha Bhallamudi and Manju Goel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/platform-workers-organizing-diaries-messages-from-union-organizers-to-researchers/. About the post: Researchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternati
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mpho Primus and Siri Lamoureaux can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/automating-language-losing-relationality-feminist-reflections-on-african-language-ai/. About the post: A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her response lies not only in the words she chooses, but in tone, shared history, relationships, context, and even silence. Yet these are precisely the elements that today's Large Language Models struggle to capture. As AI expands into African languages, the focus has largel
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katharina Rynkiewich can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/the-hotspot-as-a-sociotechnical-and-political-object-frontline-healthcare-professionals-and-public-conversation-alongside-the-intensification-of-a-u-s-measles-outbreak/. About the post: The post examines the utility of the term "hotspots," used to identify spatial clusters of infectious diseases, by looking at how it is taken up in the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) and the practices of frontline healthcar
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sumin Myung can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/stuck-among-the-trees/. About the post: In this second addition to our series on Stuckness, Sumin Myung shows how contemporary scientists have come to feel stuck about their work for an unlikely reason: scientific forestry’s history of successfully replenishing the country’s extensive mountain forests since the 1970s after decades of devastation under Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and postcolonial industrial development. For Myung’s interlocutors,
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Abhigya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/charting-the-discourse-of-nature-restoration-the-eu-nature-restoration-law-in-the-public-sphere-in-czechia/. About the post: Looking closely at the public discourse pertaining to Nature Restoration Law in Czechia, one observes that the lines against which these interests cleave and coalesce remain fairly blurry. Even in the European Parliament, 21 members of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) voted in favour of the law, significantly tipping the ou
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Iván Flores can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/digital-porosity-and-value-in-suspension-informal-economies-and-video-games/. About the post: When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items
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/2026/07/the-monsters-we-buried-plastics-swamp-men-and-the-unquiet-ground-of-deonar/. About the post: Banerjee leads us into the heart of the Deonar Dumping Ground in eastern Mumbai, conjuring its monstrous presence through the lived experience of those who work there and its own as an ethnographer. Yet the monster, he reveals, is not a single beast. It is the relentless collision of old plastics, the scars of colonial land-making, faltering municipal systems,
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/is-edtechs-stuckness-a-kind-of-fixation/. About the post: In this third addition to our series on stuckness, Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry suggest that the question of what emerges in the wake of getting stuck can also be a generative opening for scholarly reflexivity. In this piece on recent controversies around the use of AI assistants in classrooms in the United Kingdom, the authors situate this recent debate within a longer histor
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Victor Secco can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/searching-for-microbes-with-no-name-the-labour-of-sampling-and-the-making-of-scientific-value/. About the post: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with microbiome scientists on a sampling expedition along Europe's coastlines, this post follows the manual, embodied labour that turns soil, water, sand, and air into biological data. It argues that the value circulating in bioinformatics is created earlier, by hand, in the field—through the muddy, unglamorous
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Seon Shim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/collaborating-with-precarity-anthropology-on-crip-time/. About the post: Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short‑term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish threaten sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, raising a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration,
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. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/platypod-episode-twelve-hacking-alternative-futures/
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tania Cristina Pérez-Bustos and Ana María Ulloa-Garzón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/why-study-smell-in-clothes/. About the post: The question that begins this text guides an investigation that brings together two fields that are marginal to the social studies of knowledge, materiality, and technology: olfactory studies and textile studies. At that intersection, we seek to ethnographically investigate a minor gesture: smelling the clothes of someone who is no longer there, within an everyday and d
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Şafak Kılıçtepe and Emine Onculer Yayalar can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/between-cure-and-care-governing-bodies-in-turkiyes-hybrid-medical-landscape/. About the post: What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Bl
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Vageesh Vishnoi can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/delivering-in-delhi-ethnographic-reflections-on-working-with-the-food-delivery-platform/. About the post: This ethnographic reflection emerges from participant observation as a food-delivery rider in Delhi and examines how platform workers navigate the spatiotemporal realities of gig work. While existing scholarship has extensively analysed algorithmic management, this account foregrounds workers’ lived experiences of mobility, rest, and ephemerality.
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes and Mandy Penney can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/becoming-with-mushrooms-multispecies-collective-autoethnography-for-reworlding-educational-environments/. About the post: Engaging with mushrooms as conceptual companions allowed us to explore the complex multiplicity of ways of knowing, living, being, and valuing that are entangled in world-building (van Dooren et. al., 2016). The mushroom, and more specifically, the entangled network of root structures below the visible f
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Neiman and Erin Coleman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/noclipping-into-the-contemporary-anthropology-in-the-backrooms/. About the post: Other franchises may inspire or invite fan art, fan theories, and fan fiction. But for Backrooms, this kind of participation is not incidental to the product; it is constitutive of it. Even for anthros who normally have no truck with narrative film in general, or who assiduously avoid horror in particular, we argue that the Backrooms phenomenon's remarkable r
