Platypus

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Field Notes from Rajja Days: On Rest and Recovery for Migrant Construction Workers in Bengaluru

 Vineetha Nalla  November 11, 2026

Rain came down hard as we sheltered beneath the layers of tarpaulin that formed the roof of a small jhopdi (a makeshift hut made from inexpensive or scrap materials like wood, metal sheets and plastic) in one of Bengaluru’s informal settlements. Bengaluru, the capital city of Karnataka in southern India, is home to numerous such settlements where migrant construction workers live and work. After days of oppressive heat in August, it finally rained, and within minutes rivulets formed along the mud pathways between the jhopdis. I was accompanied by Radha, a grassroots worker involved in housing and labour rights advocacy for migrant workers, who often assists me with translations in the field. We were visiting the settlement on a Sunday, a rajja day for our regular follow-up conversations. Rajja means a day off, and while rajja can be any designated day of the week depending on the workers’ schedules and employment arrangements, in this particular settlement Sunday served as rajja day. This settlement is one of the several field sites I continue to visit as part of my ongoing doctoral fieldwork with migrant construction workers in Bengaluru. (read more...)

Recent

Humming Savannah: On the Data Center as a Site of Resonance

 Junnan Mu  November 9, 2026

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In 2021, Chinese telecom giant Huawei formally handed over the Konza Ubunifu data center to the Kenyan government. The data center is the infrastructural core of the “city brain” for Kenya’s first smart city, the Konza Technopolis, a new town built from scratch on the outskirts of Nairobi. After nearly two decades of making and remaking, and as a flagship project of Kenya Vision 2030, Konza has yet to deliver on its promises. The launch of the Ubunifu data center marks a watershed moment for the smart city as it asserts its pivotal role in the country’s digital landscape. (read more...)

What Makes An Egg Collapse?: Infrastructures of Egg Freezing

 Beste İrem Köse  November 6, 2026

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“I am not really emotionally ready for children, but this is on my mind on repeat: Biologically speaking, your eggs are collapsing, your eggs are collapsing.” I heard this from Dicle, a migrant lawyer in her late twenties, during our in-depth interview in central Frankfurt. I understood two years later what was puzzling me about her exact wording. What did it mean, exactly, for an egg to collapse? The way she expressed it in our native language, Turkish, was yumurtaların çöküyor. Collapsing eggs was the fitting translation, but it still seemed strange. The Turkish verb çökmek is rather literal. A building could collapse; a bridge could collapse. But how does an egg collapse? (read more...)

Mycelial Connections to Past, Present, and Pedagogy: Communities of Practice and Care, My Dad, and Me

 Mandy Penney  November 4, 2026

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Mushrooms, and what they inspire through their networked connections through the land, I now realize, have been a part of my personal and pedagogical self for a very long time, in ways both explicit and hidden. Most recently, in our Becoming-With Mushrooms series, Dani Dilkes, Jenny Foley, and I have worked with and alongside our mushroom companions (Pearl, Lion, Blue, and Pink) to imagine Multispecies Collective Autoethnography (MSCoAE) as both metaphor and method for resisting the capitalist and colonial structures of higher education. As I stand in this season of my life – both midcareer and midlife – I have begun trying to articulate the threads that meaningfully weave together my experiences as a child growing up in Newfoundland, as a Biology student and then as an English one, as a graduate student then (and, again, coming up), and as an educator. Through our rich and generative collaboration over the past few months, my colleagues and mushroom companions have prompted me to reflect on the stories that shape me, why I teach in the ways that I teach, and for whom I do this work. (read more...)

“There is a Ghost in the Box!”: Insightful Surprises From a Note-Taking Archive

 Karina Aranda  November 2, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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The Zettelkasten technique involves writing down your ideas on index cards and assigning them a code that allows you to organize and branch out those ideas to connect them to one another. When you return to your notes weeks, months, or even years later, what you find there often surprises you. Because estrangement and surprise are valuable in research, I want to explain how I believe this phenomenon occurs. In doing so, I argue against the representation of slipboxes as “Second Brains for productivity,” a framing that has become popular in recent years. Instead, drawing on my own experience, I argue for approaching them within a framework of slow, crip temporality—as a way to challenge traditional conceptions of the value of preserving and “managing” knowledge. I propose an experimental perspective, open to fragile modes of existence and knowledge, situated halfway between light and shadow (Souriau, 2016, p. 220). (read more...)

Back to Class: Designing For, With, and Through the Class Struggle

 Eugene, Gena Kim, Nathan Kim  October 30, 2026

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In 2024, members of the Cargill Tenants Union launched two months-long rent strikes in response to deteriorating conditions at their buildings, culminating in a year-long rent freeze, comprehensive lead inspections, air-quality inspections, mold abatements, lease renewals, and state and federal intervention in their support. Tenants in this struggle could indeed avoid putting themselves at risk of eviction if they were to mind their own business and pay their own rent, but instead chose to act together to improve conditions for all tenants and, in so doing, pursue transformative change. Their victory concluded one particularly fiery and successful campaign in the history of the Connecticut Tenants Union, sending waves across the country: this is what militant and well-organized tenants can accomplish. (read more...)

Does Everything Belong Back Home? Rethinking Repatriation in the Brazilian Context

 Amanda Domingues  October 28, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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The process of repatriation—or the return of artifacts to their origin communities around the world—has taken center stage globally, drawing intense interest from anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and museum professionals. It remains as much a domestic (within nations) discussion as an international one. The debate plays out on both scales because there exist at least two opposing views on who owns cultural heritage. One side argues that cultural objects form a national cultural heritage—a view known as cultural nationalism (Merryman 1986). In contrast, those who advocate for a cultural internationalism view these objects as part of a shared human culture that belongs to all humanity. From this international perspective, an artifact’s country of origin or current location does not matter because cultural property belongs to “everyone” (Appiah 2009). Therefore, protecting and preserving it becomes everyone’s interest and responsibility. (read more...)

Unfinished Bodies: Cosmetic Surgeries Among Aging Sex Workers in Singapore

 Rong Mu  October 26, 2026

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When I met Mia in her massage parlour, she had recently undergone cosmetic surgery. She openly showed me the sutures, dense and deep, tracing almost her entire hairline. Two weeks earlier, she had travelled to Shanghai for a major facelift involving the lifting and tightening of the skin. She even showed me videos of the operation: the surgeon peels back the skin of her face, pulls it taut, and sutures it into its new position. It reminded me of The Painted Skin in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi), where the demon peels off a face like a mask and replaces it with another. However, what gave Mia her new face was not a supernatural spell but modern surgery: a painful, costly, and carefully planned intervention made possible by highly sophisticated surgical techniques. More important, it carries Mia’s hope for work. Originally from China and now a permanent resident in Singapore, Mia has been working in the sex industry for more than ten years. “I’m fifty now,” she told me. “Just look at all the young, beautiful girls in the building. If I don’t undergo cosmetic surgery, what choice do I have? How could I ever compete with them? I need to survive. I still have to work and make money.” For Mia, cosmetic surgery was crucial to both her work and her future. If her appearance determined her competitiveness in the market, then surgery was an investment in her livelihood. (read more...)