April | 2026 | Platypus

Blood Circulation: Opening Up a Closed System

 Awa Diagne  April 29, 2026

On any given day, at any given moment, blood flows through bodies, flesh and viscera, shaping our world from the inside out. The process is rather simple, I have been told: in the human body, blood is propelled by the heart, repetitively flowing from the right atrium and right ventricle, through the pulmonary system, into the left atrium, left ventricle, and aorta. It then unfurls into the rest of the body and back to our starting point, the right heart. (read more...)

What’s in a Name?

 Faridah Laffan  April 27, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

 Listen to a reading of this post.

“My Dear Sir,” wrote Henry Fox Talbot one Wednesday in late 1870, “I am informed by Mr. Cooper that a new Society under your auspices is going to be…formed for the promotion of Egyptian and Assyrian Archæology and Biblical Chronology…It will perhaps be difficult to devise a suitable name for the Society, that of Syro-Egyptian being preoccupied. Perhaps Egypto-Chaldæan would do – I know nothing of the Syro-Egyptian beyond its name, but I suppose from the fact of your promoting a new society, that you think the Syro-Egyptian a failure.” Talbot was a British aristocrat and a scholar of Assyrian cuneiform, writing to Dr. Samuel Birch, keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum. The two men had corresponded about Assyrian antiquity for almost twenty years, working to decipher cuneiform texts stamped into ancient clay tablets. Birch’s response was swift. His new project would combine the Syro-Egyptian Society with another organization, the Chronological Institute, to create an expanded journal for “researches connected with Biblical lands.” (read more...)

What the Map Conceals: Sovereignty and the Sea in the Strait of Gibraltar

 Adam Matthew Mikhail  April 22, 2026

Ce contenu est également disponible en français.

 Listen to a reading of this post.

An aerial view of the Strait of Gibraltar shows something that resembles order. Container ships move in two disciplined lanes, their wakes parallel lines across the surface. Between them, a single patrol vessel sits like a traffic cop at an intersection. Smaller ships move differently: ferries on fixed schedules, fishing boats angling across the grain, following lines invisible from above. The Strait, fourteen kilometers at its narrowest, appears split down the middle, dividing Morocco from Spain, Africa from Europe. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described the sea as the exemplary smooth space—fluid, directionless, resistant to the grid—but also as the first place to be striated, ruled into navigable geometry by technologies of longitude and open-water navigation. From above, the striae of the strait are clear. The question is what that striation conceals. (read more...)

Criminality, Risk, and Labor: Altruistic Surrogacy in Contemporary India

 Ritu Ghosh  April 20, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

Surrogacy is a form of assisted reproduction in which the gestational labor of birthing a child is carried out by someone other than the intending parent/s. Surrogacy in India has gained a great deal of popularity over the last three decades, emerging as a major transnational commercial hub. Generating close to $2.3 billion in annual revenue (Rudrappa 2015), the industry was largely unregulated, until recently. In December 2021, the Indian state passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, criminalizing commercial surrogacy and permitting only altruistic surrogacy for select clients. The Act bans the “commercialization of surrogacy services,” outlawing any possible compensation for surrogate workers, whether it is “payment, reward, benefit, fees, remuneration, or monetary incentive in cash or kind” (Government of India 2021, 2). In effect, surrogacy is legally permitted only if it is “altruistic,” with heavy punitive measures in place for commercial surrogacy. By “altruistic” surrogacy, the state means an unpaid surrogacy arrangement that is borne out of the good will and selflessness of the surrogate worker, upon whose body the biomedically intensive, complicated, and risky process of surrogacy is carried out. It is important to note that surrogacy arrangements in India are largely shaped by stark power imbalances. Surrogate workers tend to come from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, and are often low-income, oppressed-caste women from rural areas. Intending parent/s, by contrast, are typically more privileged – urban, middle-to-upper-class, and from dominant-caste groups. These structural disparities have significant implications for surrogate workers in the current moment, with the regulatory turn to “altruism.” (read more...)

Data Borders: Three Years Later

 Melissa Villa Nicholas  April 14, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

What should we do today? How would you write Data Borders differently today? But what can I do? People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (Villa-Nicholas 2023), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection. (read more...)

Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: How Do They Shape Unionizing?

 Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri  April 9, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

This article is the fourth article in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, and the third post here. In January 2024, hundreds of women workers associated with the on-demand home services app Urban Company (henceforth UC) gathered in protest outside the platform’s regional office in Hyderabad, India. The workers, many of whom were working as beauticians on the app, were protesting a slew of platform policies that had steadily eroded their working conditions over time (Figure 1). Most notable of these was the introduction of a new feature called ‘auto-assign’, which requires workers to mark the time slots that they are available to work on the app, following which they are assigned gigs automatically by the platform. The new ‘auto-assign’ policy marked a significant shift away from a previously more flexible system, where women could choose their gigs and hours. The promise of flexibility has been a prime reason that attracted women workers to platforms like UC, as it enables them to access paid work while also attending to their housework and care work responsibilities. It is this very erosion of flexibility that women were holding UC to account for. (read more...)

Techno-Ethics and Feminist AI: What Role for an African Studies Approach to Science and Technology?

 Alena Thiel  April 7, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

This post is inspired by the collaborative conceptualization of a workshop on African feminist AI held at ETHOS Lab in May 2025. It is deeply indebted to the ideas shared by the workshop organizers and participants. (read more...)

From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection

 Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, Pat Kinley  April 2, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español

 Listen to a reading of this post.

This special series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. As disruptions to public health ripple through the healthcare landscape in the United States, and whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to haunt our collective present, the fundamental terms or “keywords” through which we understand disease transmission demand ethnographically-grounded inquiry, critique, and theorization. The posts in this series look at how infectious diseases and their conceptualizations spread through space and time, as well as how ethnography can articulate the expansive, lived realities of infection. (read more...)