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Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes

 Cheryl Hagan  February 27, 2025

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...)

On Menstruation and Feeling Shame

 Rosario Rm  December 19, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en Español

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Menstruation as a subject of study is not new. Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Bobel, Miren Guillo, and Karina Felitti, among many others, have discussed how menstruation has been related to specific practices, and how taboos present great dynamism and variability as specific cultural constructions frequently linked to systems of bodily control and gender. In this post, I present research that explores how taboos associated with menstruation are reflected in the bodily and emotional trajectory of menstruating women and people through the implementation of a methodology based on the collective construction of emotional corpobiographies (Ramírez, 2024). Although the relationship between taboo and shame around menstruation has been widely documented from various scientific and theoretical perspectives, this research seeks to delve into the moments, key actors, and narratives that make emotions and attitudes become embodied and acquire deep meaning in the menstrual experience. The study focuses on the trajectory of university women in Guadalajara, Mexico, and is a qualitative analysis that builds upon the results of the “Fluye con seguridad” survey, conducted in 2023 in the University of Guadalajara network. (read more...)

Swimming Against the Current: Navigating Distrust in Open Science

 Valerie Berseth  December 17, 2024

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This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. On a cool autumn day in Vancouver, I took my car, a warm coffee tumbler in hand, and drove into the woods to witness the return of salmon to their spawning grounds. I followed highways and dirt roads to the Adams River, where dense forest meets fast-moving water. I was there for the Salute to the Sockeye—a festival that gathers people from all walks of life every four years, when sockeye salmon are returning in the largest numbers of their four-year life cycle. Every year, salmon return after spending two to three years in the ocean navigating past rocks, hungry bears, eagles, fishing hooks, and even waterfalls. They push forward bit by bit, against the odds, to reach the precise place they were born where they spawn and die. Scientists don’t fully understand how salmon navigate this long, upstream journey, but we know they rely on subtle cues from the earth’s magnetic fields and the river’s chemistry to guide them home. (read more...)