General | Platypus

A Concert in the Rainforest: Sound in Multispecies Ethnography

 Quinn Georgic  December 13, 2022

The four minute clip above was one of many that I recorded during preliminary fieldwork this past summer in the Eastern rainforest corridor of Madagascar. This specific recording occurred during a weekend trip to Analamazaotra with two of my interlocutors- biologists who study in Ranomafana National Park, my primary fieldsite. That morning, we had woken with the crepuscular mist to hike the muddy trails that transected the area. Walking with Jean, from the local guide association, we spent the morning as many tourists would, spotting camouflaged Nightjars nesting on the ground and smiling at brown lemurs that wrestled on Traveler’s Palms. Throughout the walk, we heard the haunting calls of Indris, Madagascar’s largest lemurs and one of its most recognized, due to its song and striking black and white patterning. (read more...)

Little Experiments in Worldmaking with Amor Mundi Lab

 areeya tivasuradej, AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab  December 8, 2022

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The AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab transpires as a collaborative space for emerging scholars, artists, scientists, and practitioners of all kinds working in the Global South with a common theme in multispecies anthropocene studies. Anthropocene and ecopolitical theorist Maya Kóvskaya, who recently joined the Faculty of Social Science at Chiang Mai University in 2020, shares their idea of the lab and extends the opportunity to students across disciplines. Through Maya’s inspiring energy as the Lab Director, our network of collaborators and interlocutors grows. Among many who join and share their scholarship from around the world, a core group of people who are already based in Chiang Mai come together to give this emerging space a chance to move forward. (read more...)

Uncovering Ethnography in Creative Practice Research with Machines

 Oliver Bown  December 6, 2022

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This blog post comes out of a discussion with Ritwik Banerji about the ‘hidden’ role of ethnography in the work involved in creating new experimental systems for music improvisation. Ritwik put it to me that “it seems that a lot of work … involves a kind of ‘implied ethnography’ – that is, it’s clear that the author/designer has lots of personal experience with the domain they’re designing for, and yet the technical documentation of such systems makes scant mention of it.” This was a welcome invitation to reflect on my past practice since I had once been a student of social anthropology and am now, as an associate professor 25 years on, re-engaging with ethnography as a methodology. Have I been implicitly using ethnography all along, and could/should this component have been more explicit in the presentation of my work in an academic context? I will begin with some scene setting. (read more...)

Beauty Filters: New Tech, Old Problems

 Dolly Church  November 29, 2022

Retaining a youthful appearance is a laborious and painful exercise, often rife with invisible labor. Digital beauty tech has made it much easier. Rather than altering our own faces through cosmetic procedures, we now have a conduit — an online persona — that can easily be touched up with the help of beauty editing apps or filters. This has done little to challenge ageist prejudices but has offered an avenue out of old age in the form of customization. In offering up this tech, the beauty industry can be seen to perform a bait-and-switch, displacing the weight of beauty standards from physical appearance onto our consumer choices. (read more...)

You Are What You Grow: Crops, Cultivation, and Caste in India

 Tanya Matthan  November 15, 2022

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Fieldwork can produce odd obsessions. As an anthropologist studying agrarian risk economies, mine was onions. In the central Indian region of Malwa where I conducted research, onions seemed to be everywhere. As I observed (and occasionally, but poorly, assisted with) farm work, I became fascinated by the bulb: its seasonal shades of pink shifting from winter magenta to a spring blush; the way its bright green stalks stood perfectly upright in the field; the speculative frenzy of the auction during peak season; its pungent flavor in raw, pickled, or fried form; and not least, the unexpected wealth it produced for a few and the dashed hopes and devastation it wreaked on most others. (read more...)

Toxicity, Violence, and the Legacies of Mercury and Gold Mining in Colombia

 Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis  November 9, 2022

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Toxic substances are often portrayed as stubborn molecules that resist being restricted to the places where we would like to contain them in order to free ourselves from the environmental and health damage they cause us . Mercury —a heavy metal used for different products and industrial processes— illustrates how the effects of these substances are mediated not only by their “stubbornness” or physical-chemical persistence but also by histories of power, violence, and domination. (read more...)

Platypod, Episode Five: CASPR – CASTAC in the Spring 2022

 Angela VandenBroek, Dawn Nafus, Melissa Cefkin  November 3, 2022

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This episode presents a recording of CASPR 2022, or the CASTAC in the Spring 2022 event, which took place on May 10, 2022. CASPR 2022 was organized to encourage dialogue on breaking down binaries that have separated academe and industry. Angela VandenBroek (TXST), Melissa Cefkin (Waymo), and Dawn Nafus (Intel) discuss their work in leading socially-informed research in industry contexts. (read more...)

LaMDA and the Limits of Sentience

 Chorong Park, Rua Williams  October 24, 2022

In early June, Blake Lemoine, then an engineer at Google, claimed that LaMDA, a Machine Learning-based chatbot, was sentient and needed to be treated with respect. LaMDA stands for Language Model for Dialog Applications. AI chatbots are designed to interpret user-entered text, analyze key phrases and syntax with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) models, and generate responses and actions that feel believable as a conversational partner . After multiple conversations with LaMDA, Lemoine concluded that LaMDA was psychologically like a child of 7 or 8 years old . Google accused Blake Lemoine of “persistently violating clear employment and data security policies” and fired him . (read more...)