General | Platypus

The Politics of Civic Education

 Elif Memis  March 11, 2025

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...)

Disruptions in Grace: Embracing Mutation and Disability in Nature through Art

 Emery Vanderburgh  February 6, 2025

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Gripping tightly onto a walking stick, I slowly and precariously make my way through the forest. Careful not to catch my prosthetic foot on the exposed roots, I’m scanning the ground when I see a disfigured branch, gnarled, with burls and nodules on it. These masses—called “galls”—are a common growth mutation that can be caused by various factors: bacteria, insects, and rapid changes in weather. I grew up on a fruit tree farm, so I’ve seen this before, but a different familiarity, like a kinship, spurred me to take the branch home. I soon became obsessed with the idea of “tree tumors” and the aesthetics of mutation in nature as a beautiful and intriguing expression of disease and disability. They evoked memories of the way seeing my medical scans eased the abject fear of my cancer – even though the scans felt alien and depersonalized from me, they offered a concrete visual anchor that demystified my diagnosis. (read more...)

Platypus in 2025

 Kim Fernandes  January 21, 2025

Welcome to Platypus in 2025! Last year, we published over 65 posts, almost half of which were also in a second language, and maintained a readership from 169 different countries. A full summary of CASTAC’s activities in 2024 can be found at our 2024 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...)

2024 in Review

 Katie Ulrich  December 20, 2024

Welcome to our annual wrap-up of CASTAC’s 2024 activities! We are grateful to all of you, our readers, for engaging with our content this year and we look forward to sharing more pieces on the anthropology of science and technology in 2025. (read more...)