Platypod is the official podcast of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. We talk about anthropology, STS, and all things tech. Tune in for conversations with researchers and experts on how technology is shaping our world.
Read the transcript here. Dr. Luis Felipe R. Murillo is a brilliant author and anthropologist. I sat with him to chat about his new book Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures published in 2025 by Stanford Press, and was deeply impacted by the richness of perspectives he describes in the book, and during our interview. (read more...)
Read the transcript here. This was meant to be a podcast about making podcasts. But in the end, this podcast is really just a conversation between two people who used to be close friends. It rambles and meanders. It doesn’t always stick to a coherent point. I wondered then whether it could also be academically useful. Relevant to conversations in anthropology? Or even interesting to anyone other than me? This podcast is a conversation with Thuy Nguyen, founder of the Berkeley Community Acupuncture clinic and licensed TCM practitioner who has her own podcast, You Are Medicine. We first started talking about what it’s like for her to make a podcast back in March, on a long drive together from Bakersfield, California to Window Rock, Arizona. Thuy runs acupuncture pop-up clinics and is training interns as part of her Navajo Healing Project there and she invited me to spend a weekend (read more...)
View/Download the transcription for this episode. For this episode of Platypod, I interviewed space anthropologist Savannah Mandel about her new book Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration (Chicago Review Press, 2024) where she writes about commercial space exploration in the US based on her ethnographic fieldwork with SpacePort America in New Mexico, and with space policymakers in Washington DC. (read more...)
Download the transcript for this episode. This podcast episode talks to three anthropologists, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Rine Vieth, and Kara White, scholars working in three different parts of the world who use multimodal methods in their teaching and research. It is not a history of multimodal methods, or even a really detailed review of them; instead, it is a consideration of some of the issues they raise or resolve for ethnography. Whatever Tim Ingold has or hasn’t said about ethnography, he inadvertently offered what I think is the most compelling definition when he wrote: It is where we, “join with things in their passage through time, going along together with them, working with them, and suffering with them” (24, 2020). I’m tweaking the first part of this sentence to make it work here, as he’s actually describing the Latin prefix co- and his idea of “the gathering,” but it works for (read more...)
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...)
Download the transcript of this interview. For this episode of Platypod, I talked to Dr. Tanja Ahlin about her research, work, and academic trajectory. She’s currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and her work focuses on intersections of medical anthropology, social robots, and artificial intelligence. I told her of my perspective as a grad student, making plans and deciding what routes to take to be successful in my field. Dr. Ahlin was very generous in sharing her stories and experiences, which I’m sure are helpful to other grad students as well. Enjoy this episode, and contact us if you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions for other episodes. (read more...)
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...)
This episode presents a recording of CASPR 2022, or the CASTAC in the Spring 2022 event, which took place on May 10, 2022. CASPR 2022 was organized to encourage dialogue on breaking down binaries that have separated academe and industry. Angela VandenBroek (TXST), Melissa Cefkin (Waymo), and Dawn Nafus (Intel) discuss their work in leading socially-informed research in industry contexts. (read more...)
In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Baird Campbell (Rice University) and Ilana Gershon (Indiana University Bloomington). They discuss the politics of connection and disconnection via social media in Chile and the US. (read more...)
In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Elizabeth Roberts (the University of Michigan) and Sophia Jaworski (the University of Toronto). They discuss the complexities of corporeal life in toxic environments. This episode was created with the participation of Elizabeth Roberts (the University of Michigan, speaker), Sophia Jaworski (the University of Toronto, speaker), Svetlana Borodina (Columbia University, host, producer), Gebby Keny (Rice University, host, sound editor), and Angela VandenBroek (Texas State University, CASTAC web producer). The transcript of their conversation is available below. We thank Sophia Jaworski for her work on editing the transcript for comprehension. (read more...)
In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Laura Heath-Stout (Brandeis University) and Rebecca-Eli Long (Purdue University). They discuss their research and experiences of ableism in academia, anthropology, and higher ed, in general. This episode was created with the participation of Laura Heath-Stout (Brandeis University, speaker), Rebecca-Eli Long (Purdue University, speaker), Kim Fernandes (University of Pennsylvania, host), Svetlana Borodina (Columbia University, host), Gebby Keny (Rice University, sound editor), and Angela VandenBroek (Texas State University, CASTAC web producer). The transcript of their conversation (edited for comprehension) is available below. (read more...)
In its opening episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Cassandra Hartblay (University of Toronto) and Zihao Lin (University of Chicago). They discuss their research on accessibility cultures, politics, and technologies. This episode was created with the participation of Cassandra Hartblay (the University of Toronto, speaker) and Zihao Lin (the University of Chicago, speaker), Kim Fernandes (University of Pennsylvania, host), Svetlana Borodina (Columbia University, host), Gebby Keny (Rice University, sound editor), and Angela VandenBroek (Texas State University, CASTAC web producer). The transcript of their conversation is accessible below. (read more...)
The bonus episodes below are the most recent readings from Platypus, The CASTAC Blog. Look for more readings in the Platypus archives or find them on your favorite podcast app.
A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her words lies not only in the words themselves, but in tone, shared history, the relationship between speaker and listener, the setting, and even the silence that precedes the response. None of these become part of the training data for today’s large language models (LLMs). (read more...)
John Snow’s 19th century dot-map (from the series introduction) is representative of a shift in the public management of infectious diseases towards measuring density of confirmed cases within a geographic region. This practice is referred to in epidemiology as spatial clustering and as “hotspots” more colloquially. Today’s outbreak investigations use visual representations of disease spread as a standard practice. Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracker was one such communicative tool for showing the intensification of an outbreak across space and time. The visual becomes representative of a more than normal number of confirmed cases in spatial and temporal balance, to allow the viewer to identify what we reference as hotspots. In what follows, I will examine the utility of the term hotspots through an investigation into the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) put in contrast with the localized practice of frontline healthcare professionals in South Florida. I will show how hotspots have meaning beyond their colloquial uptake as clear and accurate representations of who is getting sick. (read more...)
This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. On a sunny day in November 2021, I was taking a walk with two forest scientists, Junho and Minho (pseudonyms). Junho was then working as a junior researcher at a premier research institution in South Korea, whereas Minho was a Ph.D. candidate at a university lab. During my fieldwork with forest scientists from 2017 to 2023, I frequently encountered growing expectations that new field technologies—drones, high-resolution satellite sensors, or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) devices—would replace some of the traditional fieldwork components that depended on diameter tapes, calipers, hypsometers, or increment coring. For many younger scientists, these field techniques were considered notoriously time-consuming, toilsome, and costly. While many of my interlocutors called such expectations a “hype,” Junho and Minho, as technophiles both in their early 30s, were excited about the introduction of such technologies to their fields. (read more...)
The EU Nature Restoration Legislation was finally adopted in 2024, after going through the rounds of the EU parliament since 2022. The passing of the law marks a key moment in the EU’s pursuit of the European Green Deal, adopted in 2019. The European Green Deal is the EU’s growth strategy aimed at putting EU on the path to a green transition, with the ultimate goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. The ambitious Nature Restoration Legislation is expected to provide legal instruments to facilitate the restoration of declining ecosystems across the European Union. It supports some of the key goals of the biodiversity pillar of the Green Deal (the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030), akin to how the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) sets legally binding climate neutrality targets for the member states. Some of the measures outlined in the regulation include supporting sustainable agriculture, greening cities and towns, protecting pollinators, and restoring wetlands and rivers. (read more...)
When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy. (read more...)
It is a winter day. Workers at the dump are busy emptying trucks, sweating profusely as the sun beats down on all of us. The smell of the freshly arrived waste grows worse in the heat. I have come to the dumping ground to meet Shivam, a municipal officer deputed there to supervise the workers. (read more...)
This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. If you are one of the millions of people who have watched Sal Khan’s recent TED talk, you might think AI is poised to rescue struggling education systems all over the world. The UK government certainly seemed to agree when it announced that it was investing £2m to develop an AI lesson-planning tool for teachers, describing this project as “…a perfect example of the revolutionary benefits this technology can bring.” We, like other critical scholars of “EdTech” (see Macgilchrist, 2021), are not convinced. (read more...)
It was an early crisp morning in late April 2023, I climbed into the back seat of the Hilux with the other field scientists, heading to the day’s sampling site on the north coast of Belgium. We sat in silence in the car, part of the early-morning mood and a sign of how tired and overworked we felt most days for the last month. Outside the car’s window urban and green fields landscapes alternate on our way. As we reached closer to our destination the song “A horse with no name” by George Martin started playing on the radio. Slowly the lead-scientist in the field started humming the song and then singing along quietly, as we all followed her humming, the mood inside the car completely changed. We were ready for another long day out in the elements—thorny bushes, light rain, cold wind—collecting soil, sand, water and air in search of microbes with no name. (read more...)
Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short-term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish on institutional time threaten our ability to do sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, a tension that raises a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within such a precarious, short-term, and unequal academic landscape? (read more...)
The question that opens this text guides a research project that brings together two fields on the margins of social studies of knowledge, materiality, and technology: olfactory studies and textile studies. At this intersection, we seek to ethnographically explore a minor gesture: smelling the clothes of someone who is no longer present in an everyday, domestic context. In this exploration, we are confronted with thinking of writing, rather than as a means of describing what is perceived, as a way of being present; something that accompanies the gesture, that accounts for what happens when we smell, what is evoked and fabulated, something that also shapes the encounter itself. (read more...)
What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. Officially regulated since 2014, it now encompasses everything from acupuncture and cupping to phytotherapy and leech therapy, all performed legally only by licensed physicians in certified facilities. On paper, it sounds like a tidy administrative solution. In the field, it turned out to be anything but. We began to understand this early, in a clinic in Ankara, when one of the physicians who had helped draft the original regulations leaned back in his chair and said: “GETAT is the best name.” The term, he explained, had not emerged locally, but was shaped through years of visits to countries known for their traditional medicine systems: China, India, Thailand, Germany. “We looked at how they classify it,” he continued. “What counts as traditional? What counts as complementary, holistic or integrative? You cannot just translate these things. You have to adapt them.” The controversy over the label itself signaled historical and sociological divisions around medical knowledge and expertise. (read more...)
It was 38 degree Celsius, another day of scorching heat in Delhi in the month of June when I decided to go out and book my first order for a popular food delivery platform. It came after weeks of procrastinating to work as a delivery rider following a growing body of research on platform mediated labour where researchers worked as riders to learn about the latent work realities of the platforms (Timko & van Melik, 2021). Moments before the commencement of work, I was enjoying myself cruising on the roads of South Delhi on my rented e-bike, when my excursion was immediately interrupted by the urgency-inducing notification informing me about the imminent order. As I accepted the order, I was directed to the ‘Bikkgane Biriyani’, a cloud kitchen in South Delhi for collecting the parcel. (read more...)
“Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched together.” — Sheldrake, 2020 “Multispecies relationality tuned to the temporal and semiotic registers makes evident a lively world in which being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with.” — van Dooren, 2016 Higher education in Canada is currently in a state of fragmentation, isolation, and disconnection, due in large part to shifting institutional motivations and ideologies, emerging technologies, political upheaval, and ecological estrangement. (read more...)
Released theatrically late last month, Backrooms, the latest horror film from A24, is a bona fide blockbuster. The film grossed $81 million domestically and $118 million internationally in its first three days, making it by far the studio’s most successful opening weekend, more than tripling its previous record set by 2024’s Civil War. Within its first week, users on the film-based social media site Letterboxd had collectively logged over half a million viewings. (read more...)
In October 2022, just as the monsoon was ending, Kalpana pulled me and my field partner, Sandeep, into her house in the rehabilitated village of Popharan, one of the five villages we visited to understand people’s experiences of living next to India’s first commercial nuclear power plant. Popharan was relocated in 2002 to make room for Units 3 and 4 of the Tarapur Atomic Power Station (TAPS). These rehabilitated villages flood severely every monsoon. Kalpana showed us the marks that water had left all across her house; her furniture was entirely ruined. During the worst weeks of the rains, she told us, her sons had to carry her and her grandchildren out of the house to keep them from drowning. Virendra Patil, who has spent two decades advocating for the rehabilitated villagers, walked us past rows and rows of houses abandoned due to their poor construction, each crack in their walls overtaken by plants and shrubs that grow at an astonishing rate in the wet coastal climate of Maharashtra. (read more...)
