General | Platypus

How to Create Figurations and Inhabit Feminist STS Research: A DIY Manual

 Clarissa Reche  October 17, 2024

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

For some time now, my colleagues and I at Labirinto (Labyrinth, Laboratory of Socio-anthropological Studies on Technologies of Life, State University of Campinas, Brazil) have been discussing and practicing feminist ways of doing academic research. For us, this goes far beyond prioritizing feminist readings. That’s important, but we’re trying to build practices that are articulated with what we believe politically and what we want for the university and the world. One important point is to create a welcoming working environment based on careful personal interactions that avoid as much as possible reproducing the classist, racist, and misogynist ways of working that are so common in the academic power structure. Another point is to think about how we can experiment with methodological proposals that are open to difference. Figuration, especially in Donna Haraway’s proposals, is one such experiment. This is a do-it-yourself manual on how to create figurations and inhabit feminist STS research. It is the result of these discussions in the Labyrinth, and also of my doctoral thesis. (read more...)

Do Academics Need Agents?: Part 1 of Publishing in Academia

 Savannah Mandel  October 15, 2024

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Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the publishing process, how I got my agent, and discuss whether or not academics need agents. “Do Academics Need Agents?” is Part 1 of a series on publishing in academia. In Part 2 of this series, I talk about why I, as a PhD student in STS, chose to go with a trade publisher over an academic one when my book went to auction. (read more...)

Brush Strokes to Bytes: Anthropological Praxis in Business

 Matt Artz  October 8, 2024

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The warm December sun had only recently risen over Miami Beach when I found myself in the bustling halls of Art Basel Miami 2021, one of the world’s most prestigious international art fairs. As an anthropologist and tech entrepreneur, I wasn’t there just to admire the art—though there was plenty to admire. I was there to observe and make sense of the intricate dance between artists, gallerists, and collectors in this temporary, high-stakes marketplace. Art fairs like Art Basel Miami are annual events where galleries from around the world converge to showcase and sell their artists’ work. For a few days, the fair becomes the epicenter of the global art market, with thousands of works on display and millions of dollars changing hands. Collectors, curators, consultants, and art enthusiasts flock to these events, creating a frenzy of activity as deals are struck and reputations are made. As I walked through the crowded aisles, the stark contrasts were impossible to ignore. The fair’s layout itself told a story of hierarchy and influence in the art world. Established galleries like Gagosian commanded prime locations near the entrance, their spacious booths bustling with activity. These high-end galleries had paid premium rates for their coveted spots, and it showed in their positioning and the attention they received. Their displays exuded an air of exclusivity, with artwork unlabeled—a silent statement that if you didn’t already know the piece, perhaps you didn’t belong. (read more...)

Chaotic Oscillation: Understanding the Paradoxical Presence of Video Games in Contemporary Society

 Iván Flores  October 1, 2024

Esta publicación también está disponible en español

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Common sense tells us that play and work are opposing categories. However, in our society we often encounter situations where the boundaries between these two categories become difficult to distinguish. It’s common that people earn money from hobbies—activities not typically associated with the effort required for any form of work, mostly because they are fun. These include recording oneself dancing on the street, doing product unboxings, or streaming while playing video games. The variety of activities that can now be monetized is vast; almost any activity can become a niche ready to be used by the market to maintain a consumerist dynamic. (read more...)

Critical Metals, Magic Tricks, and Energy Transition: A Social Biography of Lithium

 María Fernanda Lartigue Marín  September 26, 2024

Este contenido también está disponible en español

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A passage from the novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor reads: La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those who’d been crushed under the hillside; repopulated by outsiders, most of them lured by the promise of work, the construction of the new highway that was to run right through Villa and connect both the port and the capital to the recently discovered oil wells north of town, up in Palogacho, enough work for fondas and food stalls to start cropping up, and in time even cantinas, guest houses, knocking shops and strip clubs where the drivers, the travelling tradesmen and the day labourers would stop to take a moment from the monotony of that road flanked on either side by cane fields, cane and pastures and reeds filling every inch of land for miles and miles, in every direction, from the very edge of the tarmac to the low slopes of the sierra to the west, or running eastward to the coast, to its eternally raging waters. (2017: 25) When the novel won the 2019 German International Literature Award, the jury called it “the novel of poverty in twenty-first-century global capitalism” (HKW 2019). If poverty feels central to this novel, I believe it is because it lays out the political economy of oil from the perspective of a site of extraction, exploring the violent and exploitative labour and gender relations that orbit and enable the production of the fuel of 20th-century capitalism. In other words, it is not poverty but rather capitalism in its oil-powered dimension that might be considered central, and poverty part of its social world. (read more...)

Geoengineering: De Facto Environmental Governance and Alternative Future Making

 Cody Skahan  September 24, 2024

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I first heard about Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)—a form of geoengineering meant to address climate change through planetary cooling—during the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland, at a networking lunch for youth working in environmentalism. My Master’s thesis in Anthropology at the University of Iceland focused on Ungir Umhverfissinnar (English translation: the Icelandic Youth Environmentalist Association), which I (from the United States) had joined the board of both as a climate activist and engaged anthropologist. During my interviews and participant observation with the organization, geoengineering had never come up until my colleague from Ungir Umhverfissinnar and I were approached by representatives from Operaatio Arktis (OA). Intent on “ the polar ice caps and preventing global tipping points,” OA has followed prominent research advocates in fostering discussion around an SRM technique called Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). (read more...)

The Practice of Not Knowing

 Maythe Han  September 17, 2024

This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with a senior and reactive dog. It touches on the core themes of uncertainty and unknowability—and by extension, speculative imagination—inherent in multispecies entanglements, tying it inextricably to the preemptive grief that arises from living with a senior, and increasingly tired, dog who no longer has the same energy he once did, especially when faced with a motorcycle. It engages with the various emotional valences of everyday life shared with a nonhuman companion. The comic has two pages and 11 panels. It is drawn digitally on a white background with black 6B pencil brush on a tablet. Panel 1: I don’t know where Frank, my nine-year-old collie, has been for the first two years of his life. (Drawing of a young border collie puppy) (read more...)