General | Platypus

Peasant Reserve Zones as Techno-socio-environmental Assemblages

 Julián Medina-Zárate, Nicolas Lara-Rodriguez  June 12, 2025

Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories historically inhabited by peasant communities in Colombia. Designed as part of agrarian reform efforts, these zones are intended to promote environmental conservation and socioeconomic sustainability in rural areas. The ZRCs provide peasant organizations with a set of tools to structure their social, economic, political, and environmental governance. However, their effectiveness in achieving social and environmental objectives remains a subject of ongoing research across disciplines such as ecology, sociology, and economics. Existing studies yield inconclusive results, instead highlighting the complexity of the dynamics surrounding this institutional mechanism. (read more...)

Homecoming: Tasting Death in a Vietnamese Forensic Laboratory

 Tiên-Dung Hà  June 10, 2025

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Hội An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Quảng Nam province in Central Việt Nam. In the daylight, Hội An dazzles with architectural riches reflecting its history as a trading port and cultural hub: well-preserved wooden Chinese shophouses, French colonial buildings, traditional Vietnamese tube houses, and Japanese covered bridges. By night, the town is illuminated with colorful lanterns crafted from bamboo, adorned with silk, and fashioned into elaborate shapes, like bánh ú– a traditional Vietnamese glutinous rice cake. These lanterns serve as symbols of reverence for Gods and ancestors, while also representing wishes for luck, prosperity, and peace. Off the bustling main street Lý Thường Kiệt, nestled away in an alley just wide enough for a car, sits Nhà Lao Hội An (Hội An Prison). The building is reclusive and unassuming amid the charming city of its namesake. The prison in this serene and ancient town bore witness to some of the most intense fighting in the region’s history. (read more...)

What if We’ve Been Thinking About Wildfire Smoke the Wrong Way?

 Arielle Milkman  May 20, 2025

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Helping on a prescribed fire as a volunteer firefighter sometime in September, I felt the anticipation that had been building in our team dissipate as we learned that we would not be able to proceed with the day’s planned ignitions. We gathered our tools and snacks and slouched back toward the briefing area. I imagined others who had been assigned to work on the burn cordoning off the day as a lost cause. Folks who were working for local companies and non-profits would only be able to bill for the couple of hours we spent standing around waiting for orders, and there would certainly be no overtime. The Lomatium, Whitebeam, Kincaid’s lupine, and other species the land managers hoped would benefit from habitat restoration because of the burn would have to wait, maybe until the next week, maybe until the next season, as would their goals to reduce the likelihood of a high severity fire on the preserve. Such was the reality of attempting a planned burn, or a prescribed burn, in the suburbs of the densely populated pockets of the Willamette Valley. (read more...)

The Ecosystem Multiple: Navigating the Transatlantic Fate of Biosphere 1 ½

 Elie Danziger  May 8, 2025

Cet article est également disponible en français

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It is late March 2022, and as always the weather is sunny in Tucson, Arizona. But a big meeting gathers a binational party inside an air-conditioned building on campus. For the first time since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, French scientists from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) were able to come meet their counterparts of the University of Arizona (UA), to celebrate the launch of a partnership between the two institutions, which started officially in 2021. Through this partnership, the two parties hope to foster collaborative, complementary research, especially on the theme of the environment. One highlight of the collaboration is the potential for joint projects making use of a facility called Biosphere 2. (read more...)

“It’s like… ‘You’re welcome. Love, science’”: On Doing Critical Anthropology when the Enterprise is Under Attack

 Aaron Neiman  May 1, 2025

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Next month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first ever working draft of our species’ entire genetic code. It was a major milestone in the Human Genome Project (HGP), the ambitious international effort which began in 1990 and which remains one of the largest collaborative biology projects in history. The announcement was the subject of much fanfare, making the front page of the New York Times and the cover of TIME (headline: “Cracking the Code!”). In an offical ceremony marking the occasion, President Bill Clinton was joined in the East Room of the White House by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, the ambassadors of France, Germany, and Japan, and, via satellite, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The President proudly summarized its top-line finding: race was indeed skin-deep, a trivial outer difference belying a profound biological sameness. (read more...)

Laughter and Dreaming of Wins in Recovery

 Hannah Ali  April 29, 2025

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“Hannah, roll a six!,” Mahad, Alliance Wellness recovery program resident, pleaded as the game of Ludo intensified. Ludo, a strategic and competitive board game, was popular among Somali American men, such as Mahad, who were in the process of renegotiating their dependency on substance use. These men also held vivid memories of playing Ludo in Somalia and neighboring countries that they moved through as they sought asylum from Somalia’s civil war. I first heard about Ludo when I began fieldwork at Alliance Wellness, a recovery program for an East African communities that was developed out of community need in Bloomington, Minnesota. With increasing rates of opioid related addiction and deaths among Somali Americans, Yussuf Shafie recognized a need for culturally appropriate therapy and recovery programs for Somali Americans in Minnesota (Feshir 2019). (read more...)

Toward a Linked Data Approach to Shifting Identities and NULL Values in Data Sets

 Andrew Wiebe  April 17, 2025

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The tension between binary thinking and the fluidity of identity has long been featured in discussions of definition in computational practice within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Nowhere is this more evident than in how data systems attempt to categorize — or fail to categorize — 2SLGBTQIA+ subjects. Metadata schemas, survey tools, and classification structures often rely on rigid dichotomies, such as male/female, known/unknown, or 1/0. (read more...)

Data Centers, Transnational Collaborations, and the Differing Meanings of Connection

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, Felipe Figueiredo  April 15, 2025

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Data centers are in the news. You have probably read or heard about them. It’s as if with the snap of a finger the news cycle has changed, and the latest trend is to focus on the need to develop infrastructure to power data centers, in the US at least, where one of us is writing from. A data center is a facility where data is processed or stored, or where computer power is redistributed, where “the cloud touches the ground” (Johnson 2023: 6-7). By focusing on the history of the data centers we research, our goal in this piece is to demonstrate how they are built on top of existing infrastructures, and do not exist in thin air. (read more...)