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Platypus in 2026

Duck-billed platypus engraving, 1853.
Kim Fernandes January 21, 2026

Welcome to Platypus in 2026! Last year, we published over 65 posts, almost a quarter of which were also in a second language, and maintained a readership from 175 different countries. A full summary of CASTAC’s activities in 2025 can be found at our 2025 Year in Review. As we look ahead to another engaging year of publishing a wide range of work from the social sciences on science and technology, we are thankful for the labor that our editorial team and our authors continue to put in. We are also very grateful to you, our readers – thank you for being here every week! (read more...)

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2025 in Review

Kim Fernandes December 23, 2025

Welcome to our annual wrap-up, where we share some highlights for CASTAC’s 2025 activities! We are grateful to for your generous engagement with our content this year, and we look forward to sharing more pieces on the anthropology of science and technology in 2026. (read more...)

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The Lung Tumor We Know Exists Yet That We Cannot See

Chen Shen December 19, 2025
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Since my father’s diagnosis of lung cancer, my life has been haunted by something I cannot see. When the biopsy reported “airway dissemination positive,” I became consumed by questions: What is the shape and reach of this spread? Was the surgical margin sufficient? Has the cancer already advanced beyond what was removed, lurking undetected, growing with each breath, shifting with every cough? (read more...)

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The image shows a university environment, with a poster prominently displayed that reads "I want to study without fear and harassment."

What Not To Do If You Are Accused Of Harassment: The Case Of Boaventura de Souza Santos

Daniela Manica, Fabiene Gama December 17, 2025
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
Este conteúdo também está disponível em português
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In this text, we intend to revisit the well-known case of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, following its unfolding since the accusations that surfaced after the publication of this book “Sexual Misconduct in Academia” in 2023. We summarize the main events since then, focusing on developing a counter-manual that didactically organizes the regrettable way in which the intellectual responded to the accusations and systematically retaliated against the victims. We hope that this will contribute to ensuring that future reactions to such situations are guided by genuine desires for reparation and feminist transformation. (read more...)

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Poster de flyer de un evento de música

From the ‘Grid’ to the ‘Field’: Visualizing the Chipscene

Marilou Polymeropoulou December 16, 2025
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“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day I got in…” Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy In Autumn 2008, while studying in Athens​,​ I happened to attend an event called Error Code. The event’s poster lured me in as it depicted a Nintendo Game Boy connected to another electronic device and a keyboard. During the event, the three performers played their chiptunes – compositions which they had created live on Game Boy. Although the overall umbrella term for chiptunes would be electronic music, they all had very distinct styles, ranging from noise to electropop. (read more...)

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A sculpture with hand shape with finger tips colored in red

Touch to Make: An Index Finger’s Path into the Sculpture Factories in China

Renee Yu Jin December 12, 2025
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In spring of 2024, when green buds had already begun to appear even though light flurries were still falling in Rochester NY, I was slumped in the folding chair in my apartment, surrounded by dissertation books, the pigment tests, maquettes, and preliminary drawings for an upcoming exhibition in Beijing that October. Ever since I started graduate school, the gentle dilemma of being both an artist and a scholar has colored my days, as a tension that persists but always in the happiest ways. The room was quiet, the light soft, and my attention drifted between thinking, reading, and the pull of artwork I had not yet begun. Almost without intention, my finger moved across my phone, again, returning to the familiar drift of scrolling that has become an ordinary part of contemporary life. I opened Xiaohongshu (Red Note, the Chinese social media App) and typed four characters, sculpture factory (雕塑工厂, diaosugongchang), into the search bar, looking for workshops near Beijing and the adjacent city of Yanjiao in Hebei Province, hoping to locate production sites and people who might help accelerate the work for the exhibition when I returned in the summer. (read more...)

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The image shows seven hand-drawn paper dolls on a white background.

Doing Research Between Adolescence and Cyborgs

Irene do Planalto Chemin, Geovana Luna dos Santos, Kauan Alves da Silveira Aristides, Raylane Souza de Moura, Samara Lopes de Oliveira, Veronica Martins Da Silva November 26, 2025
Este contenido también está disponible en español.
Este conteúdo também está disponível em português
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“What do you imagine when you hear the word “cyborg”?” This was the question posed by a teenager named Kauan to introduce a presentation on Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto (2009) for the research group of the High School Scientific Initiation Program at Unicamp. An online presentation, with slides, given by an undergraduate researcher, Kauan, to four classmates and a counselor. Immediately, the imagination of a robot comes to mind for some of us. Others are open to new references. We can travel through films, dystopias, machines, high-tech and even fashion can be a cyborg reference for teenagers. Apparently, cyborgs and adolescence have historically coexisted and have a love-hate relationship. Daily connected, their bodies inhabiting poorly demarcated boundaries between online and the offline. Humor and irony can simulate both the image of adolescence and the cyborg. We don’t have a problem with conflicting feelings, and we’re internalizing the contradiction of being cyborgs in the 21st century.  We, who wrote this text, are five teenagers and one young adult, who still has the capacity to imagine “what they want to be when they grow up.” (read more...)

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A conference stage surrounded by a crowd of people and dramatic stage lighting.

Renouncing and Returning to Shareholder Value

Sakari Mesimäki November 18, 2025
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As pandemic restrictions began to ease in late 2021, the annual Finnish startup conference Slush made its return as an in-person event. Held for the first time in 2008, Slush grew through the 2010s to become a major international startup event with tens of thousands of attendees—a symbol of the “success story” of Finnish startup culture and a focus of national pride and economic hope. (read more...)

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