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A white barn and a large white telescope sit in a grassy field with some trees around and tree-covered mountains in the background.

Lonely Planet Looking for Connection: Citizen Science SETI Research at NASA

sebastian levar spivey February 20, 2024
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NASA’s homepage is as glitzy as you would expect of the U.S. Government’s sexiest administration. Glossy pictures of nebulas, astronauts, and asteroids float across the top of the page and even the ozone hole over Antarctica manages to look like a snack. A quick swipe over to the Citizen Science Page, however, and now the images give enthusiastic, low-res, DIY vibes coupled with pun-filled project titles like “Aurorasaurous” and “Spiritacular.” Each one beckons: anyone with a cellphone or a laptop can do this project. A Jacob’s Ladder of binary stretching into the blurry heavens stops my scroll with its provoking title—Are we alone in the universe? Well golly, I don’t know. Go to Project Website. So I do. (read more...)

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Image of a woman digging into a tub, the top of which is covered with ice. The woman uses a stick to dig. Her hair is covered and she wears a grey jacket and brown pants. She is standing on land covered in brown grass, and there are cattle in the background.

Water Scarcity, Hydropolitics, and the Importance of Materiality at the Foothills of the Rocky Mountains

Kimberly Sanchez January 30, 2024
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How is growing water scarcity experienced by livestock producers? And to what extent does the materiality of water and the infrastructures on which users rely influence social relations and conflict management? Inspired by eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with livestock producers in Wyoming during which water both metaphorically and physically saturated my notebooks and conversations, I suggest that the form of water, either as a river or an aquifer in this case, helps to foster different experiences of waterways and also of social relations between water users. In comparing two different waterways, the Ogallala aquifer and the North Platte River, and the infrastructures on which water users depend, I argue that surface water and irrigation canals visibly highlight interdependent relations whereas groundwater pumping conceals connections. (read more...)

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Duck-billed platypus engraving, 1853.

Platypus in 2024

Katie Ulrich January 23, 2024

Welcome to Platypus in 2024! We look forward to continuing to publish content on science and technology from anthropological and social science perspectives. We remain grateful to all our readers, as well as our community of Platypus volunteers who keep the blog running. (read more...)

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2023 year in review

2023 in Review

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes December 28, 2023

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...)

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Cover of the book Media Hot and Cold, by Nicole Starosielski. The cover contains a grid with a number of rectangles, each of which shows either different images (as photographs) or has some alphabets that form title words and the author's name. The images relate to different forms of media and their use, as well as to temperatures.

Antti Lindfors Interviews Nicole Starosielski on Media Hot and Cold

Antti Lindfors December 26, 2023

This is a conversational interview between Professor Nicole Starosielski (UC Berkeley) and me, Dr. Antti Lindfors (University of Helsinki), discussing Nicole’s book Media Hot and Cold (2022, Duke University Press). In my postdoctoral research on the emerging cultures of cold exposure as a therapeutic technique, I developed an interest in the evolving multidisciplinary field of environmental and elemental media. Nicole’s work in this area takes exciting and novel directions, introducing perspectives on how thermal communications and infrastructures reinforce power relations, shore up racialized and gendered hierarchies, and subtly persuade, control, and even subjugate us. In our discussion, we explore these subjects, from thermal metaphors to thermal violence and attractions, such as ‘coldsploitation cinema.’ The interview was conducted over email and lightly edited for editorial consistency and clarity. (read more...)

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A crowd of people chant and have one or both arms raised. There are white and sky blue flags, some with the word Racing and Racing's logo, which is composed of sky blue and white vertical stripes.

Milei, Crowds, and Concrete Waves in Argentina

Renzo Taddei December 21, 2023
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I am home, reading Stefan Helmreich’s new book, A Book of Waves (2023). The news on TV then catches my attention: I see images from the inauguration of Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei. The syntagmatic association is obvious: Milei is a new addition to the wave of authoritarian populist rulers now in office. I let out a long sigh, thinking about the future of my relatives and friends in Buenos Aires. Once again, I failed miserably in my ability to forecast election results. Previously, I missed the mark for the 2016 elections in the US and the 2018 elections in Brazil. For many years, my anthropological work has been with forecasts, albeit atmospheric ones (e.g., Taddei 2015, 2020). I often poke fun at my friends in meteorology, telling them that society is more complex than the atmosphere—perhaps to justify why we in the social sciences are so bad at forecasting collective human behavior. In any case, I have the feeling that, of all the uses of the wave metaphor, perhaps this one, associated with extreme rightwing nationalistic politics at the international stage, is the most elusive and misguiding. Is the waviness of the phenomenon derived from any measurable feature, like it is for natural phenomena such as physical ocean waves or El Niño? Or is the waviness just ascribed afterward simply as a familiar semantic container for a myriad of facts so that the public can hold it in their minds? In any case, physical oceanographers also read waves backward. They call it an inverse problem (Helmreich 2023, 258). (read more...)

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Decorated image used as an invitation for CASPR 2023

Platypod, Episode Eight: CASPR 2023

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes December 12, 2023
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Download the full transcript of this episode. The 2023 edition of CASPR: CASTAC in the Spring discussed digital ethnography and its multiple facets. The event was moderated by Dr. Baird Campbell, who, along with guest speakers Dr. Ilana Gershon, Dr. Nicole Taylor, and Dr. Patricia G. Lange, shared their experiences and valuable insights based on their many years of interactions with digital ethnography—much before the recent spike in interest in this method due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some critical insights from the event: On the online-offline divide, guest-speakers pointed out that this division will not matter in the future as interlocutors are increasingly interconnected. Speakers were skeptical about how much this topic still matters now, coming to the conclusion that this separation is largely artificial. The speakers mentioned how digital technologies, social media platforms, and other technological products would indirectly be part of future ethnographies, even if the researcher had (read more...)

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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...)

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