Platypus

Anti-Queer Violence, Bearing Witness, and Thinking with Algorithms on Social Media

 Baird Campbell  June 27, 2019

Esta publicación está disponible en español aquí.

In early June 2019, news began to break concerning the death of a Salvadoran transgender woman, Johana Medina León, of pneumonia, four days after being released from nearly six weeks in ICE custody. Before long, my Facebook feed was filled with stories detailing the persecution Johana faced in El Salvador because of her gender identity; her dangerous journey to the United States to seek asylum; and her final moments as she struggled to save her own life, as it became clear no one else would. She might have saved her own life, if she’d been given the resources. In El Salvador, Johana was a nurse. Johana’s death is tragic for many reasons, not the least of which is that had it not been for social media, it likely would have gone unnoticed. (read more...)

Hearing the Unknown: Case Studies in Cuba and Taiwan

 Jennifer Hsieh  June 25, 2019

The saga of mysterious sounds afflicting US diplomats in Cuba—and more recently China–has appeared in the US news cycle intermittently over the last couple of years. Since 2017, news organizations have reported that officials working at the US Embassy in Havana were experiencing hearing loss, dizziness, and possibly brain injury as a result of exposure to high-pitched, grating sounds. The State Department described the phenomenon as a sonic attack, believing that officials were purposefully targeted by an “acoustic element.” Cuban officials have denied the allegations by citing the failure of US officials to identify the source of the sound. Other details surrounding the incident have added to the mystery, including the fact that not all individuals who exhibited symptoms reportedly heard the sound, and those who did may not have been hearing the same sound. (read more...)

Happy Pride Month!

 Baird Campbell  June 18, 2019

In support and solidarity with LGBTQIA+/Queer people around the world, we’re celebrating Pride Month with a collection of some of our most popular queer content from the blog. We take this moment to recognize the valuable contributions LGBTQIA+/Queer people make to our fields, our society, and our lives. Check out six of our favorites below! (read more...)

Clinical Data in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: Ethnographic Engagements

 Peter Taber  June 11, 2019

By: Peter Taber, Nicholas Rattray, Lauren Penney, Megan McCullough and Samantha Gottlieb This post emerged from a 2018 Society for Applied Anthropology panel on anthropological engagements with health data in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Serving over 9 million enrollees with a current federal budget of USD68 billion, the VA is an important testing site for digital healthcare infrastructure, as it has been for several decades. The panel brought our VA research and quality improvement (QI) efforts targeting the electronic health record (EHR) and other digital infrastructure into dialog with existing work on the social lives of data and algorithms, as well as the broader concerns of medical anthropology and STS in an era of the “datafication of health” (Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017). Extracts from our conversation, presented below, are taken from a follow-up video call exploring these issues. (read more...)

Listening to/with Technology: Meditation Apps as the New Voice of Mental Health

 Rebecca Jablonsky  June 4, 2019

Shortly after giving birth to her son, Jessica began to experience a health problem that she describes simply as “pain everywhere.” About one month after we initially met at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California, she elaborated on her symptoms: “Joint pain, muscle pain, stabbing pain, stinging pain, burning pain, tingling, numbness…chest pains, palpitations, dizzy spells, headaches. I feel like I’m going to have a seizure, or brain fog, fatigue.” (read more...)

White Fans, Liberal Ideologies, and the Erasure of Black Stories in Gaming

 Akil Fletcher  May 30, 2019

Last month, the highly anticipated video game Mortal Kombat 11 (MK11) was released to an excited yet wary fighting game community. Game studio NetherRealm’s newest incarnation received praise from both fans and critics for its simplistic yet entertaining combat system, its thrilling cinematic cutscenes, and the reintroduction of original and beloved characters. However, despite its success the game was given little time to rest on its laurels, as a subset of white male fans immediately began to criticize one particular choice in one character’s story. The game featured a compelling tale in which the two separate timelines of Mortal Kombat merged to finish an ongoing plot branching all the way back to MK’s 2006 game Mortal Kombat Armageddon. As a result of this temporal shift, fan favorite black “kombatant” Jackson Briggs (or “Jax”) was given a fascinating story ending, in which he gains the ability to rewrite time, a power he subsequently uses to create a history in which slavery does not exist. (read more...)

[Author Interview] Tom Gieryn and “Truth Spots”

 Ilana Gershon  May 28, 2019

Ilana Gershon interviews Tom Gieryn about his new book, Truth Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago, 2018). Gieryn is Rudy Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Indiana University. Truth Spots began with a hunch that places matter in under-appreciated ways, and, in particular, with the question: In what ways does place matter for doing science? To understand this, however, one needs to understand the ways places become authoritative sites because they enable interactive orders that are locatable. Laboratories are counterpoised with sites seen as sparking political movements, sites that become the evidence for scientific classifications, sites that connect one to larger religious movements, and sites in which the future is predicted. (read more...)

Precarity, Exclusion, and Contract Work in the Tech Industry

 Leonore Phillips  May 15, 2019

At the satellite office of a Fortune 500 company, employees buzz around the main floor of the building. At first glance, they all seem similar. Dressed in business casual – jeans and a dress shirt— people wait in line for coffee at the coffee cart, stop and chat with coworkers, or zip past one another on the way to meetings. However, if you look at their badges, hanging from lanyards on their necks or trousers, a pattern appears. Some have dark green badges, while others have bright red ones. Those with the bright red badges, standing out in the crowd, are the contract workers. A 2018 NPR/Marista Poll reports that in the United States about 1 in 5 workers are employed under contract, and that number will only grow in the next decade. This number is especially high in the tech industry. In 2018, both Fortune and CNBC reported that (read more...)