Platypus

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Space Selfie: Rethinking Scalarity Between Orbit and Home

 Denis Sivkov  November 6, 2025

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We are in Ruzaevka, a small town near Saransk, the regional capital of Mordovia, Russia. Ham radio operator Dmitry Pashkov, photographer Sergei Karpov, and I climb the roof of the local technical college. Sergei and I are on the roof because we are interested in so-called bottom-up space exploration. Dmitry works at this college as an IT specialist. It is a cloudy day in March, and there is a cold wind on the roof, still icy from the winter. Dmitry promises to show us how to get an image of the European part of Russia using an American weather satellite. (read more...)

Recent

Series Introduction: The Politics of Writing About Platform Workers’ Organizing

 Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta  November 4, 2025

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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. (read more...)

The Ones Who Walk Away from the Internet

 Martina Di Tullio  October 31, 2025

Este post también está disponible en español

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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 (Zuidema & Urton, 1976). What might be seen as void, then, can reveal as much as, or even more than, the brightest star. (read more...)

Freud Among the Geneticists

 Rogelio Scott-Insua  October 29, 2025

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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In late 2022, I was enjoying my last semester in the United States, before I headed to Brazil to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. I spent the fall break in New York City and used my free time to head downtown and browse bookstores. I was specifically looking for books on psychoanalysis in perhaps the most (only?) Freudian city in the country. After all, NYC remains to this day a Freudian oasis within a USA that had largely moved past psychoanalysis and replaced it with cognitive-behavioral therapy, pharmacology, neuro-disciplines, and self-help. (read more...)

Uterus Transplantation: A Scientific Advance or the Reflection of Gender Stereotypes?

 Juliana Vieira  October 27, 2025

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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Uterus transplantation has been touted as one of the most innovative reproductive technologies in recent years (Brännström 2018). The procedure allows women without a uterus to become pregnant and give birth using a donated organ, which is removed after the baby is born in most cases (Brännström 2024). But behind this advancement, there is also a debate about the values and beliefs that drive the development of this technology. 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? Could this really be a solution to a medical problem, or is it a response to a social construct that prioritizes biological motherhood over other forms of parenthood? (Luna 2004; Luna 2007). (read more...)

When Queer Lovers Collaborate: The Rough Edges of Smooth Knowledge in a Diabetes Research Project

 Lyndsey Beutin, Cal Biruk  October 23, 2025

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Connect1d is a Canadian organization that was founded to involve the experiences of type 1 diabetics in research about type 1 diabetes. Its website states, “Many of us have lived experience with T1D, and we want to work closely with the diabetes community to co-create what the future of living with T1D looks like” (accessed Sept 15, 2025). It sounds good, so then, what is wrong with this image (see below)? (read more...)

Behind the Monster: Reading Frankenstein as a Warning Against Isolation, Greed, and Hubris in 21st Century Agritech

 Addison Kerwin  October 21, 2025

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In a 1992 New York Times op-ed, Paul Lewis denounced the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to exempt genetically engineered crops from case-by-case review. He likened modern agricultural scientists to the scientist Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel and introduced the now famous term “Frankenfoods.” Frankenfoods invokes Shelley’s Frankenstein to capture public unease about the unforeseen consequences of consuming genetically modified foods. The term soon drew scrutiny from proponents of the technology, including industry-sponsored front groups, agricultural businesses (also referred to as agribusiness), respected journalists, plant geneticists, and scientific organizations. Citing evidence of the proven safety of consuming genetically modified foods, they rejected the label as a reactionary, scientifically inaccurate, and fear-mongering indictment of a new and thus, unfamiliar, technology. (read more...)

Necrovitality and Porous Exclusions: On Dying amidst Chemical Vitalities

 Misria Shaik Ali  October 9, 2025

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Note: This post contains images of skin wounds. If you are dermatophobic, read/view at your own discretion. You may instead listen to the post. An entry into the world through the pore urges us to see the chemical and material world as vital, volatile, viscous, transcorporeal–some of the topics addressed in the Platypus series, “Witnessing the porous world.” Jane Bennett, in describing and diving into the “life of metal,” begins by asking, “can nonorganic bodies also have a life? Can materiality itself be vital?” (2009, 53). Life, for Bennett as they converse with philosophers Deleuze and Nietzsche is, “a-subjective” and “impersonal” (54). Bennett’s effort to “avoid anthropocentrism and biocentrism”, leads them to “material” and “metallic vitality” that is imminent from “vacancies,” “holes,” and “cracks” that render material “porous” (59-61). (read more...)