Platypus

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

 Victor Secco  July 7, 2026

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...)

Recent

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...)

Why Study Smell in Clothes?

 Tania Cristina Pérez-Bustos, Ana María Ulloa-Garzón  June 26, 2026

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Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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The question that opens this text guides a research project that brings together two fields on the margins of social studies of knowledge, materiality, and technology: olfactory studies and textile studies. At this intersection, we seek to ethnographically explore a minor gesture: smelling the clothes of someone who is no longer present in an everyday, domestic context. In this exploration, we are confronted with thinking of writing, rather than as a means of describing what is perceived, as a way of being present; something that accompanies the gesture, that accounts for what happens when we smell, what is evoked and fabulated, something that also shapes the encounter itself. (read more...)

Between Cure and Care: Governing Bodies in Türkiye’s Hybrid Medical Landscape

 Şafak Kılıçtepe, Emine Onculer Yayalar  June 24, 2026

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What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. Officially regulated since 2014, it now encompasses everything from acupuncture and cupping to phytotherapy and leech therapy, all performed legally only by licensed physicians in certified facilities. On paper, it sounds like a tidy administrative solution. In the field, it turned out to be anything but. We began to understand this early, in a clinic in Ankara, when one of the physicians who had helped draft the original regulations leaned back in his chair and said: “GETAT is the best name.” The term, he explained, had not emerged locally, but was shaped through years of visits to countries known for their traditional medicine systems: China, India, Thailand, Germany. “We looked at how they classify it,” he continued. “What counts as traditional? What counts as complementary, holistic or integrative? You cannot just translate these things. You have to adapt them.” The controversy over the label itself signaled historical and sociological divisions around medical knowledge and expertise. (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...)

Becoming-with Mushrooms: Multispecies Collective Autoethnography for Reworlding Educational Environments

 Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes, Mandy Penney  June 19, 2026

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“Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched together.” — Sheldrake, 2020 “Multispecies relationality tuned to the temporal and semiotic registers makes evident a lively world in which being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with.” — van Dooren, 2016 Higher education in Canada is currently in a state of fragmentation, isolation, and disconnection, due in large part to shifting institutional motivations and ideologies, emerging technologies, political upheaval, and ecological estrangement. (read more...)

Noclipping into the Contemporary: Anthropology in the Backrooms

 Aaron Neiman, Erin Coleman  June 17, 2026

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Released theatrically late last month, Backrooms, the latest horror film from A24, is a bona fide blockbuster. The film grossed $81 million domestically and $118 million internationally in its first three days, making it by far the studio’s most successful opening weekend, more than tripling its previous record set by 2024’s Civil War. Within its first week, users on the film-based social media site Letterboxd had collectively logged over half a million viewings. (read more...)