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!
Meet the 2026 team
With 26 Contributing Editors and 9 Multimodal Contributing Editors, this year’s team is our largest yet and brings together an incredibly diverse array of interests. Many of these interests are detailed in the bios below.
If you’d like to publish on Platypus, don’t hesitate to reach out to a Contributing Editor or Multimodal Contributing Editor whose interests are related to yours. You can find their contact information by clicking on their names. If you are unsure of who to get in touch with, email the Managing Editor, Kim Fernandes, at editor@castac.org.
Contributing Editors
Aaron Neiman is a medical and psychological anthropologist currently working as a postdoctoral research associate at the Washington University in St. Louis. His work asks how new mental health treatments, particularly AI chatbots and psychedelic medicines, affect scientific and popular understandings of therapy. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, and his work has been supported by the NSF, the NIMH, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.
Aisha Chughtai is an emergent interdisciplinary scholar and popular educator working at the intersections of medical anthropology, humanitarianism, and social theory and policy. She is interested in globally-oriented questions of moral practice and social good, focusing particularly on socio-political intersections across the Global South. Aisha is a former Fulbright scholar and completed her graduate training in Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Bronte Jones is a medical anthropologist and sociologist from Australia researching reproduction, gender, and family formation, particularly among LGBTQIA+ people who access assisted reproductive technologies. Bronte holds an interdisciplinary MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society from the University of Cambridge, UK (2025) and is currently a Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University, Australia.
Clarissa Reche
Clarissa Reche is an artisan, educator, designer and social scientist who works at the intersection of science and art. She is currently a researcher at the Center for the Development of Creativity at the State University of Campinas, where she works in science journalism alongside the Latin American Network of Feminist Anthropology of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on knowledge production in areas such as synthetic biology and anthropology, particularly the interfaces between the body, biology, technology, culture, expressive forms, ethics and knowledge. She engages with feminist and decolonial critiques.
Eva Steinberg
Eva Rose Steinberg (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation research examines the practices surrounding plant breeding and biodiversity conservation as they relate to notions of purity, property, and adapting to climate change. She focuses on peanut breeding, collecting, and growing, and is currently collaborating with several groups in North Carolina and Georgia on a participatory peanut breeding project.
Wanqing Iris Zhou is a third year PhD student of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), anthropology/history of computing, knowledge production, technology, morality, and identities. Iris studies and works with computer scientists and examines their designs, responsible and human-centered AI solutions for social problems. Her project aims to illuminate how a new technology builds relationships and extends their presence in human lived experiences and futures.
Iván Flores (he/him) holds a PhD in Anthropological Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa. His research interests center on processes of technological appropriation. He has studied the ways in which scholars use social‑digital platforms, the trajectories of young people aspiring to become digital athletes, the resistance practices of urban artists, and the production of works with artists who incorporate digital technologies into their creative processes. He is a member of the “Labor in Contemporary Capitalism” working group at CLACSO. He teaches Social Psychology in the Psychology Department of the Iberoamerican University in Puebla, Anthropology of the Body in the School of Humanities and Education at Tec de Monterrey, Puebla Campus, and Psychology, Society and Technologies at ITESO in Guadalajara.
Jackie Ashkin is a scholar of science, technology, and the environment based in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the politics of knowing and adapting to (coastal) ocean futures. She draws on the material properties of ocean water to better understand scientific knowledge practices and infrastructures, engage with the world-making role of technology, and examine the limits of neoliberal environmental governance. Through her work, Jackie seeks to rethink Eurocentric and colonial imaginations of environmental crisis that in turn shape what futures are within reach. She maintains an ongoing interest in indigenous studies, more-than-human lifeways, and art-science collaborations.
Juan Camilo Ospina Deaza is an anthropologist and bioethicist whose work examines health, care, and emerging technologies. His research focuses on AI ethics, antimicrobial use, and the social dimensions of evidence, policy, and everyday practice.
Kanikka Sersia
Kanikka Sersia is a PhD Candidate at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland. Her research interest lies at the interface of Anthropology of technoscience and labor. Through an ethnographic study, her doctoral thesis investigates everyday coding practices of software developers in a ride-hailing platform in India. Previously, she has contributed to research on digitalization and the future of work at ILO Geneva, and Oxford/IIIT-Bangalore’s Fairwork Project.
Lilith Frakes (she/her) is a PhD student in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a designated emphasis in Anthropology. Her dissertation research examines the ethical, scientific, and affective assemblages that emerge around hybrid primates in conservation and sanctuary contexts, with ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia and the United States. Drawing on multispecies ethnography and science and technology studies, Lilith explores how practices of care, conservation, and classification shape possibilities for interspecies flourishing, and how hybrid animals unsettle dominant conservation paradigms and scientific categories. Lilith has experience collaboratively editing academic writing in multilingual research contexts, working closely with international scientists, early-career researchers, and students to clarify arguments while preserving voice and intellectual intention. As an editor, her interests include care and conservation, multispecies entanglements, ethnographic experiments, scientific knowledge production, and interdisciplinary work that bridges anthropology, primatology, and environmental humanities.
Melina Campos Ortiz
Melina Campos Ortiz is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Analysis at Concordia University and holds an MA in Media Practice for Development and Social Change from the University of Sussex. Her research, situated at the intersection of environmental anthropology and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), explores the social dimensions of agrochemical indicators in Costa Rica. Through a combination of participant observation, document ethnography, and environmental storytelling, she interrogates how these indicators illuminate fundamental issues of life, death, and ecological governance in the Anthropocene. In addition, she has an active role at the Concordia Ethnography Lab, where she has served as coordinator, led the multi-lab network EMERGE for 3 years, and regularly contributes to and curates the lab’s blog. Her research is supported by Concordia University, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Misria Shaik Ali is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at IIT-Delhi. She has PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She researches on “radio-porosity,” radioactive contamination and regulatory “epistemologies of neglect” along India’s nuclear fuel cycle, cohering debates across STS, feminist science, postcolonial & sensory studies, and agnotology.
Paige Edmiston is a postdoctoral fellow in health systems research at the VA Seattle Center for Innovation with a joint appointment in the University of Washington School of Public Health. Her current research focuses on caregiving and social support in kidney transplantation. Paige completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder where she studied the digital transformation of American diabetes care and its implications for access, equity, and work.
Dr. Pradip K. Sarkar is an experienced academic in Information Systems, with a career spanning over two decades. He coordinates the Bachelor of Information Technology degree at Box Hill Institute and lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. His current research interests focus on the role of emerging technologies—particularly artificial intelligence—in higher education.
Pradip is also undertaking his second PhD at the School of Media and Communications, RMIT University. This research examines the digital practices and ecosystems of independent musicians in India. Beyond academia, he maintains an active practice as a music journalist, DJ, and radio presenter, hosting Tiger Beats Elephant Grooves, a South Asian music show on PBS FM, Melbourne.
Ritu Ghosh
Ritu is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research interests lie at the intersections of gender, reproductive technologies and justice, and law and policymaking in the Global South. More specifically, her research explores India’s surrogacy industry in the context of new legislative policies, and the implications of such policies on notions of gendered subjectivity and (re)productive labor.
Samiksha Bhan is a PhD candidate in the department ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany. She’s a medical anthropologist interested in how the provision of genetic health services to India’s most marginalized communities produces problems of inclusion, stigmatized risk, and racialization. Based in the city of Hyderabad (Telangana, India), her dissertation is an ethnographic account of public health interventions that map disease genes on racialized populations while mobilizing families affected by genetic blood diseases towards their future prevention. Samiksha holds a Master’s in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics and an M.Phil from the University of Hyderabad. At Platypus, she is looking to work on writing related to postcolonial science and technology, precarious ecologies, and indigenous genomics.
Sameeha Vardhan
Sameeha Vardhan is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Texas State University. Her research sits at the intersection of digital platforms, kinship, and moral decision-making, with a focus on India. She studies how matchmaking platforms translate social values such as caste, family honor, intimacy, and compatibility into interfaces and algorithms. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in North India, her dissertation examines both how these platforms are designed and how users and families interpret, adapt, or resist them in practice.
Shreyasha Paudel
Shreyasha is a PhD student in Computer Science, with a specialization in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research is interdisciplinary bridging theory and methods atthe intersection of Human Computer Interaction, Critical Data Studies, and Feminist and Decolonial STS. Her PhD project examines the information practices of grassroots activists and civic tech organizations developing digital tools for environmental and climate justice in Nepal. Through this research, she seeks to understand the role of digital technology and data as sites of political contestation that shape our understanding of climate change and possible responses to it. As a contributing editor in Platypus, she is interested in working on articles they deal with issues related to data and environmental justice, particularly from authors working in/from South Asia.
Andra Sonia Petrutiu is a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell University interested in state-science relationships. Grounded in postcolonial studies of technoscience, affect and the nation, her PhD project explores in a historical ethnography the past and present of Indian supercomputers and the Indian scientists that coalesce around them. In her previous M.A. research, she analyzed how Indian climate modeling shapes and is shaped by far-reaching technopolitical trajectories, changing discourses of self-reliant development, and the reproduction of the postcolonial nation and state power via articulations of technoscientific prowess. In addition, she conducted research on U.S. supercomputing and religious worship in Hindu temples. Reach out to Sonia for contributions on topics such as: postcolonial science and technology studies; history and anthropology of computing; infrastructure, nationalism, and affect studies; anthropology of ontology; environmental ethics; discourses on the Anthropocene.
Sook-Lin is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation looks at healthtech initiatives and companies (public and private) in Singapore, with a focus on processes of commercialisation and personalised/precision health. Her research sits at the intersection of health, technological innovation and financialisation.
Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research looks at questions of expertise, practice, and governance across climate/environmental projects in postcolonial cities. As part of her dissertation, she is looking at the urban and political ecology of urban forests in Pakistan, with a particular focus on more-than-human relations, labor, and city-making.
Thomson Chakramakkil
Thomson Chakramakkil is a PhD candidate in the Technology in Society research cluster, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. He has held visiting fellowships at the Centre for Policy Futures (CPF), University of Queensland, and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Prior to doctoral research, he worked at Oracle as an information developer.
Thomson’s research is situated at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and critical labour studies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian IT sector and his own experience as a former tech worker, Thomson examines how contemporary workplaces are managed through data-driven aggregation. More recently, he has been exploring his experience of cancer care through the lens of STS, focusing on the affective and epistemic labour that sustains it as both a spectacle and a system.
Tiên Dung Hà is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests are focused on how, and to what extent, science and technology can address ongoing legacies of war and colonialism in the context of Southeast Asia. Her dissertation examines the intersection of science, spirituality, and memory in the bilateral scientific cooperation between Vietnam and the United States to use DNA technologies to identify the remains of Vietnamese war dead. This project has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Prior to her studies here at Stanford University, Tiên Dung also received a M.A. degree in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, USA.
Victor Secco is a social anthropologist working at the intersections of microbiology, environment, and religion. His PhD from the University of Manchester examined bacteriophage research and Hindu rituals in the Ganges River in North India, while his current postdoctoral research at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice explores planetary microbiome studies through ethnography with environmental genomics laboratories across European coastal areas. His work examines the computational infrastructures of bioinformatics and sampling practices in the production of microbiological knowledge.
Volney is a genetic anthropologist with a PhD whose research sits at the intersection of infectious disease, evolutionary genetics, and sexual health. Her work focuses on identifying mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages associated with increased risk of cervical cancer among individuals infected with human papillomavirus (HPV). Through this research, she aims to contribute to more equitable, accessible sexual health care and to help reduce the stigma surrounding sexual and reproductive health.
Multimodal Contributing Editors
Chen Shen (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include electricity and energy, transport and logistical media, urban studies, and multimodal methods.
Christine Ji-Young Kim
Christine Ji-Young Kim, also known professionally as “WiseFlower,” is a BA’21-PhD candidate at UC Irvine Department of Anthropology. She has an academic background in Anthropology, STS, and Humanities, as well as a professional background in simultaneous interpretation and UI/UX. Her dissertation research with Deaf and crip people in VRChat and beyond explores how people with non-normative bodies hack worlds and spaces that weren’t designed with them in mind, with the primary goal of being able to exist in their truest forms on their own terms, rather than technical perfection and/or mastery. As a scholar, she is committed to making knowledge accessible through various means, both within and outside of institutions. As a person, she enjoys listening to energizing Kpop in sunny Southern California beaches to remind herself to be happy about the mundane little things in life.
Dani Dilkes
Dani Dilkes is an interdisciplinary researcher, educational developer, and educator located in Ontario Canada. Her work sits at the intersection of feminist sociomaterialism, critical pedagogy, and design/knowledge justice. She draws on creative, critical, and collaborative methodologies to interrogate social practices and structures. She believes that broken systems can be repaired through small changes rooted in interdependence and radical imagination. When she’s not thinking about how to make higher education better, she is cycling, making a mess in the garden, or taking care of cats.
Genevieve Collins is a Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Manchester completing a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media. Her research with scientists and artists explores climate change, the artificial cryosphere, and the sensory and affective dimensions of cold in the subarctic. Her work exists at the intersection of critical temperature studies, cold humanities, and cryopolitics, and uses multimodal methods in anthropology such as photography and sound recording. She is from Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada).
Junnan Mu
Junnan Mu is a PhD candidate in African and African American Studies with a primary field in Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research explores different forms of life emerged and are being reshaped by Kenya’s (re)making of the “silicon savannah.” She practices sensory ethnography and is intrigued by the analogy between gardening and writing.
Karina Aranda Escalante is an independent researcher and editorial assistant based in Mexico City. Her primary interests include knowledge infrastructures, experimental methodologies, accessible publications, and the ethical and political aspects of academic research and publishing. She holds a Master’s degree in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (University of Manchester, UK). She studies a PhD in Philosophy of Science (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico). Her project addresses disability justice and the tinkering of methods to address the experiences of people with psychosocial disabilities and neurodivergence.
Kayah (they/them) is a non-binary social scientist based in Brazil, and a master’s student in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo (USP). Their research engages with conspiracy cultures, marginal and alternative epistemologies, and the production of violence in online communities of involuntary celibates (incels), in dialogue with Science, Technology Studies (STS). Alongside their academic work, they work in public administration on digital experimentation, innovation, and technology policy, and are interested in exchanging ideas with others working on digital extremism, infrastructures, and contested forms of knowledge.
Mauricio Baez
Mauricio Báez is a Ph.D. candidate at Universidad Javeriana. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Epistemology of the Social and Natural Sciences. In addition, he has worked on the production of various audiovisual projects.
Seon Shim
Seon Shim is a filmmaker and anthropologist based in Vancouver, and a PhD student in socio-cultural and medical anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where her research focuses on disability, media, and Korean cultural production. Her multimodal work explores how collaborative documentary and experimental ethnographic media can unsettle clinical framings of autism and foreground disabled artists’ own narrative and sensory worlds, most recently through the ethnographic film “The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams,” which follows a Korean autistic artist’s journey to New York. As a Multimodal Contributing Editor for Platypus: The CASTAC Blog and a contributing editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, she curates accessible, disability-centered media projects and critical writing that bridge anthropology, science and technology studies, and disability arts communities across Korea and its diasporas. You can find updates on her work through her website: seonshim.net.
Platypus Leadership
Angela VandenBroek, Web Producer
Angela K. VandenBroek is a sociocultural anthropologist researching technologies, innovation, and business (and all the hype that entails) as an assistant professor at Texas State University, where she is also the director of the Innovative Anthropologies Lab. Her research sits at the intersection of business and design anthropology and feminist science and technology studies. In addition to a PhD in anthropology, she has more than thirteen years of experience as an applied anthropologist in information technologies, design, marketing, and organizational strategy. She has served as a board member and web producer for CASTAC since 2013 and is responsible for maintaining CASTAC’s digital infrastructures and brand.
Kim Fernandes, Managing Editor
Kim Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. As a researcher, writer and educator, their work lies at the intersections of disability, data and technology. They are also an affiliate at Data and Society and the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life. They hold a joint PhD (with distinction) in Anthropology and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. More about Kim’s work can be found here.
Natalia Orrego, Public Relations Manager
Natalia Orrego is a PhD student in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago de Chile) working at the intersection of infrastructure studies, digital anthropology and telecommunication history. Her dissertation is about the 5G rollout in Chile, highlighting the entanglement between national public policies with contestation in daily life.
