Platypus

When Queer Lovers Collaborate: The Rough Edges of Smooth Knowledge in a Diabetes Research Project

 Lyndsey Beutin, Cal Biruk  October 23, 2025

Connect1d is a Canadian organization that was founded to involve the experiences of type 1 diabetics in research about type 1 diabetes. Its website states, “Many of us have lived experience with T1D, and we want to work closely with the diabetes community to co-create what the future of living with T1D looks like” (accessed Sept 15, 2025). It sounds good, so then, what is wrong with this image (see below)? (read more...)

Behind the Monster: Reading Frankenstein as a Warning Against Isolation, Greed, and Hubris in 21st Century Agritech

 Addison Kerwin  October 21, 2025

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In a 1992 New York Times op-ed, Paul Lewis denounced the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to exempt genetically engineered crops from case-by-case review. He likened modern agricultural scientists to the scientist Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel and introduced the now famous term “Frankenfoods.” Frankenfoods invokes Shelley’s Frankenstein to capture public unease about the unforeseen consequences of consuming genetically modified foods. The term soon drew scrutiny from proponents of the technology, including industry-sponsored front groups, agricultural businesses (also referred to as agribusiness), respected journalists, plant geneticists, and scientific organizations. Citing evidence of the proven safety of consuming genetically modified foods, they rejected the label as a reactionary, scientifically inaccurate, and fear-mongering indictment of a new and thus, unfamiliar, technology. (read more...)

Necrovitality and Porous Exclusions: On Dying amidst Chemical Vitalities

 Misria Shaik Ali  October 9, 2025

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Note: This post contains images of skin wounds. If you are dermatophobic, read/view at your own discretion. You may instead listen to the post. An entry into the world through the pore urges us to see the chemical and material world as vital, volatile, viscous, transcorporeal–some of the topics addressed in the Platypus series, “Witnessing the porous world.” Jane Bennett, in describing and diving into the “life of metal,” begins by asking, “can nonorganic bodies also have a life? Can materiality itself be vital?” (2009, 53). Life, for Bennett as they converse with philosophers Deleuze and Nietzsche is, “a-subjective” and “impersonal” (54). Bennett’s effort to “avoid anthropocentrism and biocentrism”, leads them to “material” and “metallic vitality” that is imminent from “vacancies,” “holes,” and “cracks” that render material “porous” (59-61). (read more...)

Dreaming of Security through Lanyards and Bollards

 Samuel DiBella  October 2, 2025

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A perimeter is always porous, to certain people. Managing how it is perforated is a kind of professional work. In my fieldwork at a casino, a guard all in black sheepishly hands out blank visitor IDs that we wear only in a closed room. He collects them on our exit to the floor and accompanies us up to the lobby bar because of regulations. In the discussion, a man expresses his exasperation at an embassy’s request for an ambulance during a US National Special Security Event. I don’t understand why he makes an ambulance sound so ominous—he says he didn’t sleep for days—until someone later explains to me that he was worried the ambulance would be filled with explosives and allowed to slip through security lines. In The Filing Cabinet, Craig Robertson describes how information architecture via office furniture soothed clerks of “the particular anxiety produced by the knowledge that paper records create an alternative paper-based reality to which officials defer” (pp. 253). With two tools, the lanyard and the bollard, I consider how security work engenders and manages similar anxieties about the inherent instability of persons and property. (read more...)

Reflections on a Feminist Anthropology or a Mutirão Anthropology: Karipuna Girls and Women

 Ana Manoela Karipuna  September 30, 2025

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I am an Indigenous woman from Karipuna people and an anthropologist living in Belém, one of the largest cities in the Brazilian Amazon in the state of Pará. However, my Indigenous community is based elsewhere. The Karipuna people live in the Uaçá, Galibi and Juminã Indigenous Lands in the municipality of Oiapoque, in the northern part of the state of Amapá, on the border between Brazil and French Guiana. The Palikur, the Galibi Marworno and the Galibi Kali’na people also live here. This context is important for understanding the themes I will explore. My identity as an Indigenous woman and anthropologist informs my writing, offering insights into the connections between Indigenous Karipuna women, anthropology, empowerment, the women’s movement, and feminism. (read more...)

Digital Colonialism as “Progress”: What Will Convince You to Swap Your Guitar for an iPad?

 Harshit Gujral, Selena Ling, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Tahiya Chowdhury  September 25, 2025

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“I don’t think I could ever be convinced to use an iPad as a replacement,” said Elisabeth Dorion , a songwriter, composer, and musician based in Toronto, in response to Apple’s ‘Crush’ advertisement (Dorion 2025). Elisabeth’s reflection on the physical pain of seeing pianos, sacred tools of artistry, smashed into oblivion in Apple’s flashy tech advert was a raw gut-punch: “It hurts me physically to see these things being crushed.” (read more...)

A Feeling for Information: Technological Potentiality and Embodied Futures in Post-Socialist China

 Yue Zhao  September 23, 2025

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One sunny afternoon in March 2024, I walked into a flea market in Chengdu, China — a labyrinth of book stalls, shadowed corridors, and a handful of solitary customers. The vendors were largely absent, or perhaps stationed on stools in darkened corners, their faces illuminated by the glow of mobile screens. Each stall overflowed with dust: old magazines, documents, books, and well-worn notebooks that formed towers of forgotten knowledge. I pulled one volume after another from these stacks, hoping to find archival materials about a forgotten episode in the history of information technology in China. For a moment, I found myself yearning for some extraordinary sensory gift that would allow me to scan and locate relevant archival materials in this sea of information with greater precision and speed. (read more...)

Collaborating Bodies: Community Gardens and Food Forests in Central Texas

 Nadia Luis  September 11, 2025

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Almost every aspect of life on earth interacts with soil. Soils are old. Soils take time to develop from their parent material. Soils embody life itself. Yet, the concept of soil varies depending on the epistemic culture applied to define what soil is. Often soils exist in states of naturalness or unnaturalness. For example, Minami (2009) describes the Chinese compound character for agricultural soil 土壤 (tǔ rǎng), the first character (tǔ) represents soil in its natural state, and the second character (rǎng) represents soil once it has been broken up for agricultural purposes. Here, an interesting dichotomy presents itself: soil as it is and soil as it is once altered by human intervention. This dichotomous classificatory system describes changes that result from soil processes interacting; however, curiously, soil in only one category is the product of perceived human interaction. (read more...)