Platypus

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

 Prerna Gupta  June 15, 2026

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...)

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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。

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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...)

Cartographing the Brazilian Manosphere: Toponymic Aliases in a Public Forum

 Leonardo Thibau  June 10, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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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.

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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...)

Outbreak Mitigation at the Crossroads: Technical Expertise, Political Imperatives, and the Myth of John Snow

 Alejandro Cerón  June 5, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en Español.

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Outbreak mitigation always operates within a tension between technical expertise (lo técnico) and political imperatives (lo político). My conversations with epidemiologists in Guatemala over the past twenty-eight years have taught me that this dichotomy places a strain in their daily work that reaches its highest intensity during an outbreak. The essence of this challenge lies in what one seeks to mitigate. The technical prioritizes disease and its effects on population health while the political, in contrast, prioritizes certain social, economic, or political consequences of the epidemic’s spread. In their accounts of outbreaks, several of these epidemiologists have invoked the figure of John Snow, the English physician who in the nineteenth century investigated the causes of several cholera epidemics in London. I argue that Snow functions here not simply as a historical reference, but as a modern myth, one that offers clues for understanding how epidemiologists make sense of the persistent tension between technical expertise and political authority, especially when performing the work of mitigating outbreaks. Below I present examples of this dichotomy and references to Snow, whom I then analyze as a modern myth that offers clues for understanding the place of epidemiology in contemporary society. (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.

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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...)

Food (In)Security Under the Microscope

 Leonardo Vilaça Dupin, Ana Paula Perrota, Rosângela Pezza Cintrão  June 2, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponivel em português.

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In November 2025, in Rio de Janeiro, the seminar (in)SAM — “Food (in)Security Under the Microscope: Rethinking the Relationship Between Food Systems, Microorganisms, and Sanitary Norms” — brought together researchers from different countries and professionals from various fields of knowledge for two days, with the aim of contributing to the development of inclusive sanitary norms for non-industrial food production. The panel discussions, which featured social science researchers and leaders from traditional peoples and communities, addressed topics such as: challenges for multispecies planetary health and for promoting food and nutritional sovereignty and security; food, microorganisms, and sanitary regulations; biopolitics in global food systems, agribusiness, and the production of large-scale (in)securities; and methodological and interdisciplinary challenges for research and regulations involving microorganisms. (read more...)

Domesticating Affordances: From Surveillance to Navigation of Interfaces, How Affordances Are Reappropriated across Contexts by Rural Indian Women

 Debjani Chakraborty  May 29, 2026

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Joginder Kaur (54) had no formal schooling. For her, phone calls always meant pressing the green button to receive a call. Dialling numbers or navigating menus were not part of that routine—until they became unavoidable. In came emojis, used to mark different people in her contact list: Birds, hearts, and just a smiley face. Each representing a new contact. (read more...)