Welcome to CASTAC 2023 in review! In this post you will read about the wonderful work that our CASTAC team and community has put together. We thank you for engaging with our content this year and hope you will continue to do so in 2024. Without further ado, let’s get started with our annual review. (read more...)
Welcome to Platypus in 2023! We’re excited for another year of anthropological and social thinking around science and technology. Last year we had over forty-five posts on topics ranging from photoshopping desire to monstrous matter to human-tree relationships to anti-racism in anthropology, as well as several Platypod episodes on disability and toxicity, ableism in higher ed, and more. The blog had over seventy-six thousand visits in 2022 and maintains a readership from 187 different countries. We’re looking forward to another engaging year. We feel such gratitude to you, our readers; thanks for stopping by every week. And thank you to our authors and contributors. If you’re interested in writing or creating for Platypus this year, read on. (read more...)
In February 2020, Delhi witnessed one of the worst incidents of communal violence where 53 people, mostly Muslims, were killed, hundreds were injured, and property worth millions was destroyed. While the complicit role of the police, as an instrument of the state, became visible in engendering violence, the role of social media, especially big tech like Meta (formerly Facebook), in exacerbating violence remained imperceptible. Although the preponderance of hate speech and its unbridled reposting on social media is not new or surprising, what merits attention is the way in which the big tech is absolved of its responsibility to be accountable for the social damage caused by its platforms. Yet, during the Delhi Legislative Assembly’s proceedings in 2021, where the chair of the Peace and Harmony Committee asked Facebook India about the steps taken to curb hate speech propagated on its platform and address user’s complaints about the content posted (read more...)
It has been said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. We might think of the platypus in much the same way, though the key difference is perhaps that—as of yet—it is unclear what the Platypus Committee was trying to create. Regardless, the platypus has long been emblematic of the limitations of scientific classification. An egg-laying, duck-billed, poisonous mammal: the only surviving member of its species and genus. It is this persistent and natural spirit of disruption and provocation that led the founders of this blog to christen it with the name of this thoroughly confusing and fascinating creature. Its defiance of orderly categorization serves as both a metaphor and motivation for the continued intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies, sometimes considered strange bedfellows. (read more...)
The 2018 meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), was held from August 29th to September 1st, (mostly) in the International Conference Center (ICC) in Sydney, Australia, and was dedicated to the theme of TRANSnational STS. As Kim Fortun, the current president of the society, asked: What, How and Why TRANS? This four-day event, itself made of so many sub-events, was convened for in the Southern Hemisphere for the second time ever (the first was Buenos Aires back in 2014); it was also the second time the meeting was held in the Asia-Pacific Region (after Tokyo, in 2010). As its theme and location demonstrate, the annual 4S conference and the organizing society itself have been undergoing a transformation to include a more global community. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that STS itself is becoming globalized. As 4S 2018 revealed, this international expansion is part of (read more...)
One of the benefits of access to YouTube’s vast sea of content is that by finding and watching videos that relate to our scholarly interests, however indirectly, we are able to tell ourselves that there is something productive about time spent drifting around the internet. There are, for example, plenty of videos of old lectures by our favorite thinkers and authors floating around out there. However, as the three theorists featured in this post would well understand, the conventions of this sort of presentation do not make the most of the medium. It can be a lot more revealing to see concepts and arguments we usually encounter on the written page play out in formats that are more unusual and more dialogic. In this post, I’ve collected a few of my favorite examples of the sorts of casually meandering discourse I find particularly illuminating. (read more...)
Donald Campbell (1969) famously blamed the “ethnocentrism of disciplines” for academics’ tendencies to spawn “a redundant piling up of highly similar specialties leaving interdisciplinary gaps”. While Campbell never gives an extended definition of his term, disciplinary ethnocentrism would seem to entail, for instance, that one views everything through the prism of one’s field; that one avidly defends the boundaries of one’s field; that one becomes blind to closely related work outside one’s field; and that one comes to apprehend disciplinary identities as quasi-natural kinds, just as “ethnicities” are often misconstrued as essences. (read more...)
In early November 2016, ProPublica broke the story that Facebook’s advertising system could be used to exclude segments of its users from seeing specific ads. Advertisers could “microtarget” ad audiences based on almost 50,000 different labels that Facebook places on site users. These categories include labels connected to “Ethnic Affinities” as well as user interests and backgrounds. Facebook’s categorization of its users is based on the significant (to say the least) amount of data it collects and then allows marketers and advertisers to use. The capability of the ad system evoked a question about possible discriminatory advertising practices. Of particular concern in ProPublica’s investigation was the ability of advertisers to exclude potential ad viewers by race, gender, or other identifier, as directly prohibited by US federal anti-discrimination laws like the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. States also have laws prohibiting specific kinds of discrimination based on the audience for advertisements. (read more...)
