Platypus

“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”: Food, Cooking, and Eating in Video Games

 Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam  May 9, 2023

“Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019) It is summer 2020 and I, like many others, am sequestered indoors clutching my recently acquired Nintendo Switch playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). In wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world seemed to swarm either to their handy technological devices or towards the soothing arms of nature. Luckily for me, my technological device included encounters with some virtual greenery—the trees and flowers of my beloved tropical Animal Crossing island. (read more...)

Violence/Freedom: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance in Public Parks

 Shanel Khaliq  May 2, 2023

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Cities all over the world have witnessed a surge in the use of surveillance technologies, such as data-gathering phone apps, facial recognition software, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras among others, to address crime and safety in public spaces. While it may appear that these technologies unequivocally create a safe environment regardless of social identities, unresolved incidents of violence against women and transgender bodies in public spaces suggest otherwise. Surveillance technologies intersect with predisposed social systems and ideas around morality and power in complex ways and may not always achieve the desired results. (read more...)

Birding in Ruins: Multispecies Encounters and the Ecologies of Evidence

 Jaime Landinez  April 25, 2023

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As we walked by some of the former shrimp ponds in an abandoned aquaculture farm, we approached a scene I easily overlooked until Julian asked me to document what was happening. We saw an egret struggling to swallow something, and I simply assumed this was what a hungry egret looked like. However, Julian’s surprise and the wingbeat that seemed to come out of the egret’s beak revealed a more uncommon scene. Through our binoculars, we soon realized that the egret was struggling to swallow another waterbird—to Julian’s fascination, a seemingly undocumented behavior for this species. Skeptical of what he suspected he was witnessing, Julian got as close as he could to the scene and took photos while I made short videos from afar, worried that I would disrupt the egret and its prey if I moved any closer. (read more...)

The Perfect Fit

 Claudio Benzecry  April 18, 2023

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In my new book, The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2022) I study the work of repair and maintenance necessary to keep the global scale going. I do so by studying the work and lives of experts in charge of the design and development of shoes for the US market. Research for this project began in 2012. I conducted five years of research between New York City (USA), Dongguan (China), and Novo Hamburgo (Brazil), scrutinizing the friction between expert work and cheap labor in the production of a ubiquitous commodity: leather shoes for the US women’s market. Low-level commodity production is not usually thought of as a place where knowledge is produced. Rather, it is studied either through a global value-chain approach or an attention to shop-floor politics. In this unexpected match between case and theory, I aim to defamiliarize the work of coordinating tacit and embodied forms of knowing. (read more...)

The Illness Experience of a Forty-year-old Hispanic Woman

 Yulany Foster-Valencia  April 13, 2023

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Different cultural upbringings can determine a person’s illness experience. The relationship between the experience of a patient, and in turn, a course of treatment is inherently valuable to document. To understand an instance of this dynamic, I interviewed Maria, a Los Angeles resident, and a forty-year-old Hispanic, low-income, single mother with six children who is a devout Christian belonging to the church Iglesia Universal. (read more...)

The Use of Patent Information to Investigate Algorithmic Systems

 Debora Machado  April 11, 2023

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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During my master’s degree, I wanted to study the idea that some social media platforms had tools for guiding users’ behavior in a certain direction. Even though this is by now commonsense among communities interested in studying tech and society, it was a hypothesis that was not easy to confirm with empirical data. That’s when I decided to experiment with patent analysis. (read more...)

Platypod, Episode Six: An Anthropology of Algorithmic Recommendation Systems

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes  April 6, 2023

Também disponível em português.

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Download the transcript of this interview. On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation, which was published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. In that meeting, we recorded an episode for the Playpod podcast, which is available at the link above. (read more...)

Making Forecasts Work: The Evolution of Seasonal Forecasting by Funceme in Ceará, Northeast Brazil

 Cydney Seigerman  April 4, 2023

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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Every January, government officials, urban dwellers, and rural families across the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil anxiously await the rainy season forecasts from Funceme, the Research Institute for Meteorology and Water Resources of Ceará. Yet throughout the state, many also proclaim that Funceme’s forecasts are “wrong,” that the forecasts do not work. (read more...)