2025 | Platypus

Following Primates

 Virendra Mathur, Aarjav Chauhan  March 25, 2025

Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming with small villages, its air soaked in the mystical scent of its culture and tradition. The landscape of the valley is a gradient of human agricultural activity merging into the surrounding forest. It is the southern entry point to the adjacent Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (Srivastava et al., 2020). Every morning, the villagers in this valley would take up their daily chores. A script was followed. Cleaning up the cowshed and tending to the cows, walking to the forest to collect wood, dry grass, and fodder, heading to the village market or Gopeshwar, the nearest town, or working the agricultural fields. In Mandal valley, there were a handful of activities likely to happen as the day unfolded. And yet, every day would unfold (read more...)

Experimental Methodologies for Listening to the Present: An Interview with Alejandra Osejo-Varona

 Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda, nicolás gaitán-albarracín  March 13, 2025

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This Women’s History Month, we are publishing an interview with Colombian anthropologist Alejandra Osejo-Varona (Rice University). Her ethnographic work is influenced by Latin American feminist epistemologies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), so we thought it would be valuable to share her perspective on multimodal ethnographic research. Nicolás Gaitán-Albarracín and I conducted this interview via videoconference. In this conversation, Osejo-Varona tells us how she collaborates with different scientific communities to explore new ways of listening to the beings that live underwater. Technologies such as microphones, hydrophones, algorithms, model maps, and spectrograms allow us to imagine other ways of relating with the species living in rivers, especially those cataloged as “invasive” in socio-ecosystems of Colombia. These new methodological approaches open forms of collaborative and interdisciplinary work to construct new sensitivities and empathies capable of envisioning other human and non-human worlds. (read more...)

The Politics of Civic Education

 Elif Memis  March 11, 2025

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Cast Your Vote (CYV), a civic education game, aims to teach conscious voter behavior to youth, simulating a fictional election campaign. Reflecting on the relationship between humans and technology, I argue that both curriculum design and the educational software the curriculum informs are political. Critically analyzing CYV’s scenario, I discuss how representation politics shape CYV’s civics curriculum and the gameplay it provides. Focusing on CYV creators’ inclusion and exclusion decisions on societal issues, I offer some suggestions to produce a more inclusive and relevant educational experience for marginalized communities.  (read more...)

What are “Walking Simulators,” Ethnographically?

 Yifan Xia  March 4, 2025

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“Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the prevalence of computation, there is still something we can learn from sociocultural anthropology, especially the anthropological ways of writing cultures – ethnography. (read more...)

Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes

 Cheryl Hagan  February 27, 2025

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Work on Artificial Intelligence writ large has moved past laudatory excitement to one of vast critique. This recent scholarship has demonstrated the various racist and sexist biases embedded within algorithmic systems (Benjamin, 2017; Browne 2015; Noble, 2018). More recently, scholarship into AI has sought to define AI as part of longer histories of colonial exploitation and extraction (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Others have argued for postcolonial or decolonial AI which is “about interrogating who is doing computing, where they are doing it, and, thereby, what computing means both epistemologically (that is, in relation to knowing) and ontologically (that is, in relation to being)” (Ali 2016, 20). Geographer Louise Amoore also defines AI not as the objective and all-encompassing thinking machine AI proponents claim, but instead an always already partial aperture. This method of doing ethics is not about claiming transparency, but about acknowledging the ways in which ethics, for humans and algorithms, is always emplaced and partial (Amoore, 2020). (read more...)