Research | Platypus

Digital Porosity and Value in Suspension: Informal Economies and Video Games

 Iván Flores  July 16, 2026

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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 directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy. (read more...)

The Monsters We Buried: Plastics, Swamp Men, and the Unquiet Ground of Deonar

 Adwaita Banerjee  July 14, 2026

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It is a winter day. Workers at the dump are busy emptying trucks, sweating profusely as the sun beats down on all of us. The smell of the freshly arrived waste grows worse in the heat. I have come to the dumping ground to meet Shivam, a municipal officer deputed there to supervise the workers. (read more...)

Searching for Microbes with No Name: The Labour of Sampling and the Making of Scientific Value

 Victor Secco  July 7, 2026

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It was an early crisp morning in late April 2023, I climbed into the back seat of the Hilux with the other field scientists, heading to the day’s sampling site on the north coast of Belgium. We sat in silence in the car, part of the early-morning mood and a sign of how tired and overworked we felt most days for the last month. Outside the car’s window urban and green fields landscapes alternate on our way. As we reached closer to our destination the song “A horse with no name” by George Martin started playing on the radio. Slowly the lead-scientist in the field started humming the song and then singing along quietly, as we all followed her humming, the mood inside the car completely changed. We were ready for another long day out in the elements—thorny bushes, light rain, cold wind—collecting soil, sand, water and air in search of microbes with no name. (read more...)

Collaborating with Precarity: Anthropology on Crip Time

 Seon Shim  July 2, 2026

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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...)