Research | Platypus

Foucault, Dialectics, and Randomized Clinical Trials: Bridges Between Medicine and Anthropology

 Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob  August 29, 2024

Well, actually, I think I really wanted to understand how you guys conduct research. So, I read some articles in anthropology and sociology back when I was in medical school, and I remember three things: First, that dialectics always came up. That word was always there… The other was that Foucault was always cited. And the third, well, I couldn’t understand what was written. Those are the three things I remember: Foucault, dialectics, and that I couldn’t understand it, but I knew it was important, and I wanted to learn. So actually, I think to answer your question, I’d love to see the kind of product you generate… to understand how you work in a broader sense. Moving away from this specific research, when I saw , it was this morning when I told you I was looking at your Lattes profile, and I sent a message to Soraya. (Excerpt from an in-person interview with Afonso conducted at a public university on October 3, 2022) Interconnections, possible dialogues, and translations. These are the three key points highlighted in Afonso’s words during an interview that contributed to my dissertation, defended in June 2024 as part of a graduate program in anthropology at the University of Brasília, Brazil. And these are also key elements for this post, where I will be arguing how we, anthropologists, can build bridges with other fields of science. However, before diving in, I will present the context of the interview with Alfonso, the work that generated the dissertation, and the adjacent reflection that produced this post. (read more...)

Between the Bitterness of Anonymity and Ethics is Racism: Reflections for Anthropological Research on Science in the ‘Backyard’

 João Paulo Siqueira  June 20, 2024

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This essay is one of the results of a roda de conversa (a conversation circle) that took place at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, in December 2023. Professor Soraya Fleischer had the idea and invited her advisees: two men and three women. Since all of us were, in different ways, doing research with researchers that were also working at the University of Brasilia, the roda de conversa had as a guiding theme the following question: what is it like to conduct research with interlocutors who share the same “institutional house”—who work in the same “backyard”? (read more...)

What Will Be Lost: A Cat, a Man with a Horse, and the Battle at Court

 Carolina Angel Botero  June 13, 2024

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This essay joins ethnographic fieldwork with a visual storyboard to explore speculative futures that arise from ongoing processes of dispossession and loss in the foothills of the Andes mountains in Central Chile. In 2022, local activists and community members from Putaendo took Los Andes Copper, the mining corporation responsible for the Vizcachitas mining project, to the Environmental Tribunal in Chile. They claimed that the corporation had failed to consider the presence of the Andean mountain cat in their environmental impact studies. This oversight could have serious and irreversible consequences for the local ecosystem and the water sources that sustain their community. (read more...)

“We had to rethink many, many things”: Reflexivity in Scientific Practices during the Zika Epidemic in Recife, Brazil

 Thais Valim  April 25, 2024

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Luiza is a pediatrician and researcher specializing in infectious diseases who works at a teaching hospital in Recife, Brazil. Her daily routine involves treating children with congenital infectious syndromes, which can lead to various clinical conditions including microcephaly. However, in October 2015, an unprecedented situation unfolded. As she described during an interview with me, “That year, a new world entered my world.” She was referring to the surge in cases of microcephaly that puzzled Brazilian doctors and health authorities that year. In Recife, where the average number of microcephaly cases historically stood at nine cases per year, there were twelve cases registered in just one maternity ward within a month. (read more...)

Algorithmic Imaginations in Agriculture: Automation?

 ZIYA KAYA  November 28, 2023

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In 2022, I was conducting my doctoral dissertation research on data-driven, automated digital farming technologies (drones, autosteering, sensors, GIS, smartphones, Big Data) in Turkey. Amidst the global hype for digital agriculture, often referred to as “smart” farming or precision agriculture, new agritech companies and startups in and beyond Turkey have been emerging alongside agribusiness corporations. These companies invest in and prioritize data-driven and algorithmic technologies over human involvement in agriculture with the assumption of the former’s objectivity and precision (Bronson 2022). For instance, the market in Turkey provides farmers with access to drones for precise chemical spraying, including fertilizers and pesticides. These drones operate autonomously, enabling farmers to target specific sub-fields rather than resorting to mass spraying. Farmers can also access various smartphone applications that, for instance, claim to offer real-time data on soil conditions at the sub-field level collected through sensors and algorithmic recommendations ensuring precise irrigation. Additionally, the companies imagine generating valuable insights into the agricultural sector for agricultural corporations, financial and biotechnology firms, and public institutions through these data-driven technologies. While not all of these technologies are extensively used by farmers in Turkey, the companies continue developing, marketing, and showcasing them and many others to automate and gather data for a wide range of agricultural operations with the claim of improving food security and ecological and socioeconomic welfare. (read more...)

Feeling Fieldwork: Affectivity, Co-creativity, and Multimodality in Ethnographic Music Production

 Jamie Glisson  November 2, 2023

Jamie Glisson · TUNDRA Listen to ‘TUNDRA’ Ethnographic work is an affective experience. While anthropological research methods have often focused on cataloging ethnographic moments through field notes and interviews, most ethnographers will agree that the written word can’t quite capture what it feels like to be in the field. As a musician, filmmaker, and producer in my work alongside anthropology, I decided to explore how skills associated with my songwriting and sound engineering might further explicate the effervescent quality of what fieldwork feels like on an embodied register. Much like an ethnography, an album comes together through a process of refinement, of connecting what may feel like disparate ideas into a narrative whole. The analytical aspect of ethnographic work also bridges the hemispheres of the brain in a similar way that recording music does. The process of translating emotions, interactions, and expression through sound relies on a basic understanding of (read more...)

On Algorithmic Divination

 Rebecca Carlson, Heikki Wilenius, Jonathan Corliss  October 31, 2023

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Algorithms are tools of divination. Like cowry shells, scapular bones, or spiders trapped under a pot, algorithms are marshaled to detect and relay invisible patterns; to bring to light a truth which is out there, but which cannot ordinarily be seen. At the outset, we imagine divination is a means to answer questions, whether in diagnosis of past events or for the prediction and guidance of future outcomes, choices or actions (Ascher 2002, 5). Yet, divination has an equally potent capacity to absorb the burdens of responsibility, to refigure accountability and, in so doing, to liberate certain paths of social action. (read more...)

Plastic Chronicles: Navigating Mumbai’s Material Mazes

 Adwaita Banerjee  October 24, 2023

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In the sweltering early hours of summer 2022, waste pickers make their way towards Mumbai’s Deonar dumping ground. Devi, a young waste picker, holds up a thin plastic bag, saying, “These are everywhere, but they’re so flimsy!” Vikas, a more senior segregator, sifting through a pile nearby, replies with a grin, “Ah, but that PET bottle in your other hand? Now that’s valuable. You’ve got to know your plastics, Devi.” Their daily interactions with these materials have given them an innate understanding of their worth and properties. It is here, amidst a sea of discarded materials, that a relationship evolves—one between the waste pickers, the myriad forms of plastics, and the urban space that surrounds them. This bond is grounded in empirical observations that bring order to the chaotic array of plastics, tying together the intricate dance of humans and materials within the city’s polyphonic rhythms. (read more...)