Research | Platypus

Collaborating with Precarity: Anthropology on Crip Time

 Seon Shim  July 2, 2026

Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short-term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish on institutional time threaten our ability to do sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, a tension that raises a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within such a precarious, short-term, and unequal academic landscape? (read more...)

Platypod, Episode Twelve: Hacking Alternative Futures

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes  June 29, 2026

 Listen to this podcast episode.

Read the transcript here. Dr. Luis Felipe R. Murillo is a brilliant author and anthropologist. I sat with him to chat about his new book Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures published in 2025 by Stanford Press, and was deeply impacted by the richness of perspectives he describes in the book, and during our interview. (read more...)

Delivering in Delhi: Ethnographic Reflections on Working with the Food Delivery Platform

 Vageesh Vishnoi  June 22, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

It was 38 degree Celsius, another day of scorching heat in Delhi in the month of June when I decided to go out and book my first order for a popular food delivery platform. It came after weeks of procrastinating to work as a delivery rider following a growing body of research on platform mediated labour where researchers worked as riders to learn about the latent work realities of the platforms (Timko & van Melik, 2021). Moments before the commencement of work, I was enjoying myself cruising on the roads of South Delhi on my rented e-bike, when my excursion was immediately interrupted by the urgency-inducing notification informing me about the imminent order. As I accepted the order, I was directed to the ‘Bikkgane Biriyani’, a cloud kitchen in South Delhi for collecting the parcel. (read more...)

A Progress Without People: Six Decades of Living Next to India’s First Nuclear Power Plant

 Prerna Gupta  June 15, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

In October 2022, just as the monsoon was ending, Kalpana pulled me and my field partner, Sandeep, into her house in the rehabilitated village of Popharan, one of the five villages we visited to understand people’s experiences of living next to India’s first commercial nuclear power plant. Popharan was relocated in 2002 to make room for Units 3 and 4 of the Tarapur Atomic Power Station (TAPS). These rehabilitated villages flood severely every monsoon. Kalpana showed us the marks that water had left all across her house; her furniture was entirely ruined. During the worst weeks of the rains, she told us, her sons had to carry her and her grandchildren out of the house to keep them from drowning. Virendra Patil, who has spent two decades advocating for the rehabilitated villagers, walked us past rows and rows of houses abandoned due to their poor construction, each crack in their walls overtaken by plants and shrubs that grow at an astonishing rate in the wet coastal climate of Maharashtra. (read more...)

Viral Afterlives: Toponymy of Zoonotic Ruptures in West Malaysia

 Nga Shi Yeu, Nga Shi Yeu  June 12, 2026

本文亦提供繁體中文版。

 Listen to a reading of this post.

In early 2026, as reports of the Nipah virus outbreak in West Bengal surfaced, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control responded with a swift escalation of prevention measures, designating the pathogen as a Category V notifiable infectious disease. In an island nation where the pig-farming industry remains a cornerstone of both the economy and cultural diet, this classification represents the highest tier of state concern, mobilizing an apparatus of epidemiological surveillance and media speculation. Yet, as these institutional gears turned, the discourse spilt over into the digital sphere. Online, the virus animated civic narratives inflected by biosecurity anxiety and the fraught moral politics of naming. (read more...)

Cartographing the Brazilian Manosphere: Toponymic Aliases in a Public Forum

 Leonardo Thibau  June 10, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

 Listen to a reading of this post.

Canal do Búfalo was a prominent Brazilian online community in the 2010s, composed almost entirely of men. In this forum, members symbolically identify themselves as “buffaloes,” drawing inspiration from a story popularized by figures such as the American motivational speaker and entrepreneur Rory Vaden (2020). This metaphor concerns how buffaloes and cows respond to storms. While cows tend to move away from the storm, prolonging their suffering, buffaloes move toward it, crossing through more quickly. In the context of this community, this image embodies an attitude toward adversity: confronting problems head-on, with resistance, courage, and a willingness to endure difficult situations rather than avoid them. (read more...)

Tracing the Legacy of Human Resilience in the Debris of Ancient Campfires

 Aylar Abdolahzadeh  June 8, 2026

این محتوا همچنین به زبان انگلیسی موجود است.

 Listen to a reading of this post.

In the summer of 2015, I was a first-year graduate student when I joined a field project at La Ferrassie, a Neandertal’ site tucked into the Périgord region of southwest France. We camped in the backyard of the late Harold Dibble’s dig house in the small town of Carsac-Aillac, where the morning air smelled of walnuts and apple trees, and the sunset turned the golden bales of hay into glowing embers each evening (Fig 1). (read more...)

“Is This the End of Disability?”: Eugenics and the Technification of Normalization

 Cristian Gustavo Gutiérrez Pinzón  June 3, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

 Listen to a reading of this post.

New reproductive and bodily intervention biotechnologies not only promise to cure or prevent diseases, but are also shaping a new regime of bodily normalization that redefines which lives are desirable, correctable, or eliminable. For several years, countries such as Iceland have stood out for medical procedures that identify the conditions under which a fetus is developing and then ask parents whether they wish to continue or terminate the pregnancy. Between 80–85% of pregnant women in Iceland undergo prenatal screening and, when the result is positive for trisomy 21, termination rates approach 100%. In Denmark the percentage is 98%, in France 77%, and in the United States 67%. Geneticist Kari Stefansson, founder of deCODE Genetics, stated: “My understanding is, basically, that we have almost eradicated Down syndrome from our society; there will hardly ever again be a child with Down syndrome in Iceland” (Quijano, 2017). (read more...)