Tag: Editor’s Welcome

Platypus in 2024

Welcome to Platypus in 2024! We look forward to continuing to publish content on science and technology from anthropological and social science perspectives. We remain grateful to all our readers, as well as our community of Platypus volunteers who keep the blog running. (read more...)

Platypus in 2022

As the new year and the new semester have been off to (hopefully) a good start, Platypus is coming back to work too. Building on a decade of work (this year Platypus turns 10!), in 2022, we will continue our commitment to providing a platform for diverse voices and critical scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and STS. We have a new team, new projects, and a great deal of enthusiasm, as always. We can’t wait to offer our readers more experimental and multimodal content (powered by Platypus’s biggest team of talented multimodal contributing editors to date!), increase the linguistic accessibility of Platypus’s materials (possible with the support of invaluable multilingual volunteers!), and widen the spectrum of genres and means of academic expression (supported by our brilliant web producer and contributing editors). Stay tuned! (read more...)

The More Things Change…

Things are more than a little unsettled, lately. The past ten days since the Inauguration have been a maelstrom of activity, leaving many of us feeling profoundly uncertain about our political, technological, and scholarly futures. Of course, we haven’t been passive. Whatever else it has been, the rise of Trumpism has been an occasion for a great deal of anthropological activity. Anthropologists from around the world have been hard at work attending to the emergence of this phenomenon as both scholars and citizens. If our activities at each of these levels have seemed somewhat disconnected, somewhat divorced from one another, it is perhaps a testament to the profound challenge to our inherited sensibilities, our disciplinary and political commonplaces, represented by the transformations we are witnessing. I think, however, that this is in some respects a constitutive feature of our discipline; anthropology has long been haunted by a tension between its ethical commitment to engagement and its methodological commitment to untimeliness. (read more...)

Editor’s Welcome 2016

This is an exciting time for CASTAC and the CASTAC Blog. CASTAC hosted a number of well-attended events at November’s Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, including our business meeting, while our website sports a great redesign from returning Web Producer Angela VandenBroek. To ring in the new year here at the CASTAC Blog, I’m continuing our yearly tradition of introducing the new team. When Patricia Lange, Jenny Cool, and I launched the Blog in 2012, we envisioned a collaborative space for discussing emerging work on science, technology, and computing from anthropological and ethnographic perspectives. To quote our About page, our goal was to “to build a thriving discourse among a community of scholars concerned about the implications of techno-science, technologized products, and worldviews for human beings and other forms of life.” We began with a team of two, Patricia and me (plus many generous authors) publishing weekly posts. This took enormous effort on the Editor’s part, which was not sustainable for an all-volunteer operation. So in 2014, Patricia announced our first crackerjack team of Associate Editors who brought in myriad perspectives, their own and those of guest authors. This collective model helps the blog keep pace with boundary-pushing research in anthropology, STS, informatics, and related fields, from graduate students and senior researchers alike, and has modeled how a scholarly blog can link academic conversations to broader public debates. As I begin my second year as the Blog’s Editor, I’m pleased to say we are expanding our editorial team (redubbed Contributing Editors to reflect better their role). We are losing one longtime editor, the intrepid Beth Reddy, stepping down in anticipation of her new role as CASTAC Co-Chair in 2017—thanks, Beth, and congrats! Meanwhile, seasoned editors Todd Hanson, Shreeharsh Kelkar, Ian Lowrie, Lisa Messeri, and Casey O’Donnell are all continuing, along with last year’s new recruits Elizabeth Rodwell, Adam Webb-Orenstein, Emily Wanderer, and Jamie Sherman. Glad to have you all! We’re sad to say good-bye to our Outreach Manager Michael Scroggins, however, who kept the Twitter feed and Facebook page lively this past year. Finally, we are welcoming five new Contributing Editors, many who are longtime Blog and/or CASTAC participants, and who expand the blog’s breadth with an exciting range of interests: Emily Brooks, Elizabeth Hare, Yuliya Grinberg, Sean Mallin, and Jasmine McNealy. Read on to find out more about them. (read more...)