Category: General

Platypus in 2026

Kim Fernandes January 21, 2026

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! (read more...)

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2025 in Review

Kim Fernandes December 23, 2025

Welcome to our annual wrap-up, where we share some highlights for CASTAC’s 2025 activities! We are grateful to for your generous engagement with our content this year, and we look forward to sharing more pieces on the anthropology of science and technology in 2026. (read more...)

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The Lung Tumor We Know Exists Yet That We Cannot See

Chen Shen December 19, 2025
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Since my father’s diagnosis of lung cancer, my life has been haunted by something I cannot see. When the biopsy reported “airway dissemination positive,” I became consumed by questions: What is the shape and reach of this spread? Was the surgical margin sufficient? Has the cancer already advanced beyond what was removed, lurking undetected, growing with each breath, shifting with every cough? (read more...)

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From the ‘Grid’ to the ‘Field’: Visualizing the Chipscene

Marilou Polymeropoulou December 16, 2025
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“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day I got in…” Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy In Autumn 2008, while studying in Athens​,​ I happened to attend an event called Error Code. The event’s poster lured me in as it depicted a Nintendo Game Boy connected to another electronic device and a keyboard. During the event, the three performers played their chiptunes – compositions which they had created live on Game Boy. Although the overall umbrella term for chiptunes would be electronic music, they all had very distinct styles, ranging from noise to electropop. (read more...)

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Touch to Make: An Index Finger’s Path into the Sculpture Factories in China

Renee Yu Jin December 12, 2025
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In spring of 2024, when green buds had already begun to appear even though light flurries were still falling in Rochester NY, I was slumped in the folding chair in my apartment, surrounded by dissertation books, the pigment tests, maquettes, and preliminary drawings for an upcoming exhibition in Beijing that October. Ever since I started graduate school, the gentle dilemma of being both an artist and a scholar has colored my days, as a tension that persists but always in the happiest ways. The room was quiet, the light soft, and my attention drifted between thinking, reading, and the pull of artwork I had not yet begun. Almost without intention, my finger moved across my phone, again, returning to the familiar drift of scrolling that has become an ordinary part of contemporary life. I opened Xiaohongshu (Red Note, the Chinese social media App) and typed four characters, sculpture factory (雕塑工厂, diaosugongchang), into the search bar, looking for workshops near Beijing and the adjacent city of Yanjiao in Hebei Province, hoping to locate production sites and people who might help accelerate the work for the exhibition when I returned in the summer. (read more...)

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Space for the Departed: Bone Ash Apartments as an Alternative to Cemeteries in Urban China

xinyi wu November 13, 2025
请阅读本文简体中文版
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Many people in China have started buying residential apartments, not to live in, but to store the ashes of deceased family members. These are called bone ash apartments. Some people think it’s creepy and unlucky to be neighbors with them. Others say, “Honestly, I’d rather have dead neighbors than noisy ones.” So, I started asking, how did bone ash apartments become a real alternative to cemeteries in China? This isn’t just about space—it’s about how land, death, tradition, economy, and policy collide in today’s urban China (UN-Habitat 2020). (read more...)

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Space Selfie: Rethinking Scalarity Between Orbit and Home

Denis Sivkov November 6, 2025
Этот материал также доступен на русском
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We are in Ruzaevka, a small town near Saransk, the regional capital of Mordovia, Russia. Ham radio operator Dmitry Pashkov, photographer Sergei Karpov, and I climb the roof of the local technical college. Sergei and I are on the roof because we are interested in so-called bottom-up space exploration. Dmitry works at this college as an IT specialist. It is a cloudy day in March, and there is a cold wind on the roof, still icy from the winter. Dmitry promises to show us how to get an image of the European part of Russia using an American weather satellite. (read more...)

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Series Introduction: The Politics of Writing About Platform Workers’ Organizing

Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta November 4, 2025
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We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the Labor Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers’ voices, supporting unionisation efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers’ organizing. (read more...)

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