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.
Mushrooms, and what they inspire through their networked connections through the land, I now realize, have been a part of my personal and pedagogical self for a very long time, in ways both explicit and hidden. Most recently, in our Becoming-With Mushrooms series, Dani Dilkes, Jenny Foley, and I have worked with and alongside our mushroom companions (Pearl, Lion, Blue, and Pink) to imagine Multispecies Collective Autoethnography (MSCoAE) as both metaphor and method for resisting the capitalist and colonial structures of higher education. As I stand in this season of my life – both midcareer and midlife – I have begun trying to articulate the threads that meaningfully weave together my experiences as a child growing up in Newfoundland, as a Biology student and then as an English one, as a graduate student then (and, again, coming up), and as an educator. Through our rich and generative collaboration over the past few months, my colleagues and mushroom companions have prompted me to reflect on the stories that shape me, why I teach in the ways that I teach, and for whom I do this work. (read more...)
The Zettelkasten technique involves writing down your ideas on index cards and assigning them a code that allows you to organize and branch out those ideas to connect them to one another. When you return to your notes weeks, months, or even years later, what you find there often surprises you. Because estrangement and surprise are valuable in research, I want to explain how I believe this phenomenon occurs. In doing so, I argue against the representation of slipboxes as “Second Brains for productivity,” a framing that has become popular in recent years. Instead, drawing on my own experience, I argue for approaching them within a framework of slow, crip temporality—as a way to challenge traditional conceptions of the value of preserving and “managing” knowledge. I propose an experimental perspective, open to fragile modes of existence and knowledge, situated halfway between light and shadow (Souriau, 2016, p. 220). (read more...)
In 2024, members of the Cargill Tenants Union launched two months-long rent strikes in response to deteriorating conditions at their buildings, culminating in a year-long rent freeze, comprehensive lead inspections, air-quality inspections, mold abatements, lease renewals, and state and federal intervention in their support. Tenants in this struggle could indeed avoid putting themselves at risk of eviction if they were to mind their own business and pay their own rent, but instead chose to act together to improve conditions for all tenants and, in so doing, pursue transformative change. Their victory concluded one particularly fiery and successful campaign in the history of the Connecticut Tenants Union, sending waves across the country: this is what militant and well-organized tenants can accomplish. (read more...)
The process of repatriation—or the return of artifacts to their origin communities around the world—has taken center stage globally, drawing intense interest from anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and museum professionals. It remains as much a domestic (within nations) discussion as an international one. The debate plays out on both scales because there exist at least two opposing views on who owns cultural heritage. One side argues that cultural objects form a national cultural heritage—a view known as cultural nationalism (Merryman 1986). In contrast, those who advocate for a cultural internationalism view these objects as part of a shared human culture that belongs to all humanity. From this international perspective, an artifact’s country of origin or current location does not matter because cultural property belongs to “everyone” (Appiah 2009). Therefore, protecting and preserving it becomes everyone’s interest and responsibility. (read more...)
When I met Mia in her massage parlour, she had recently undergone cosmetic surgery. She openly showed me the sutures, dense and deep, tracing almost her entire hairline. Two weeks earlier, she had travelled to Shanghai for a major facelift involving the lifting and tightening of the skin. She even showed me videos of the operation: the surgeon peels back the skin of her face, pulls it taut, and sutures it into its new position. It reminded me of The Painted Skin in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi), where the demon peels off a face like a mask and replaces it with another. However, what gave Mia her new face was not a supernatural spell but modern surgery: a painful, costly, and carefully planned intervention made possible by highly sophisticated surgical techniques. More important, it carries Mia’s hope for work. Originally from China and now a permanent resident in Singapore, Mia has been working in the sex industry for more than ten years. “I’m fifty now,” she told me. “Just look at all the young, beautiful girls in the building. If I don’t undergo cosmetic surgery, what choice do I have? How could I ever compete with them? I need to survive. I still have to work and make money.” For Mia, cosmetic surgery was crucial to both her work and her future. If her appearance determined her competitiveness in the market, then surgery was an investment in her livelihood. (read more...)
Sing, Muse, of the triumphs and tribulations of Latin American scholars gathered to discuss the fragile threads linking Science, Technology, and Society. Sing, Muse, of the congress held earlier this year in Colombia, barely a couple of days after the presidential election with the rising shadow of fascism. Sing, Muse, of that uneasy feeling, sharpened throughout three days of intellectual exchange, leading to the realization that our inquiries must choose between the Scylla of romanticism and the Charybdis of rationalism. From the beginning I felt the hospitality of the professors of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, despite them being busy with final arrangements. Too aware of my peripheral role in this community, I decided to stay at the margin and pay close attention to others. A feminist ethnographer working with textiles gave the inaugural lecture. She started by confessing her ambivalent feelings about the usefulness of these international meetings. She next remembered one of the first congresses of the Latin American network, where John Law eagerly spoke about non-human agency. Despite the lack of remuneration and the inevitable waste (printed materials, disposable coffee cups, megabytes of stored files in the cloud, etc.), the committee accepted the challenge of hosting the 16th Congress of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE), hoping it would be an opportunity to connect different researchers and projects. The nostalgia in the room was almost palpable. (read more...)
‘chickens take care of themselves, they live all around, withstanding by themselves’; they know how to ‘eat lizards, crickets, just to withstand and stay around here’ — João Karitiana, apud Vander Velden (2025) Among the Karitiana, a people from the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, there is a specific way of referring to certain animals raised in large numbers. Translated as “to grow,” kerep designates, among others, chickens, animals that do not need to be cared for directly by humans, managing on their own to find food. Even in domestic backyards, someone feeds them, which does not prevent them from finding earthworms and other things around them. But survive they do. In rural Brazil, chickens are raised free-range, fed corn or cracked corn, scratching freely around the yard. As Vander Velden explains, drawing on João Karitiana’s words, chickens take care of themselves, regulate their own rhythms and maintain a relatively independent existence. They “withstand on their own” and remain, in a way, apart from the human community they live in. (read more...)
Whether through awe and wonder or death and grief, human-whale relations throw into relief important epistemic, ethical, spiritual, legal, and scientific tensions. Because whales migrate across oceans and have long been in relation with humans across the globe, they inhabit multiple and often conflicting worlds of meaning and obligation. What happens in the aftermath of a whale’s death, when a whale might simultaneously be an ancestor, a source of scientific knowledge, and a potential threat to the continuation of a local ecotourist economy? (read more...)
On October 16th, 2024, I found myself unemployed. While some say unemployment can be a time to relax and catch up on sleep, this really wasn’t the case. My unemployment became a conditional liminal space, between stable pay that was without an expiration date (Odoardi et al. 2022). (read more...)
Sitting in a parked car, phone propped up on the dashboard, recording, he takes a bite of his Chipotle bowl between sentences about a metabolic drug meant to make him eat less. Almost three months into retatrutide, he’s not sure it’s worth it anymore. The drug is still locked in Phase III clinical trials, nowhere near FDA approval, meaning sellers have no legal standing to market it for human consumption (Eli Lilly and Company 2026). He tells his viewers that he briefly looked into the gray market. (read more...)
Health interventions move across spaces and geographies that they themselves help to produce. I argue that health interventions organize relationships among places and people. They define where expertise is presumed to reside, who is expected to teach, and who is expected to learn. In doing so, they reproduce an imagined distinction between places even when everyday practice continually blurs those boundaries. This post contends that health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. They also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nutrition and health interventions, I show that this distinction, between the urban spaces of Guatemala City and rural spaces of Indigenous Maya Communities, repeatedly breaks down in practice as communities and fieldworkers, those directly responsible for carrying out the interventions in the communities, reshape interventions and generate knowledge of their own. Yet the interventions themselves continue to reproduce the very rural/urban divide that everyday experience disproves. (read more...)
Concerns about declining sperm quality and male reproductive capacity have become increasingly prominent in scientific, clinical, and public discussions of fertility. Yet infertility has historically been located within women’s bodies and treated primarily as a women’s problem, placing women under disproportionate reproductive responsibility, scrutiny, blame, and clinical intervention. This framing has also contributed to men’s reproductive bodies and experiences receiving comparatively limited attention. Growing concern about male reproductive capacity has been accompanied by increasing attention to how male fertility might be preserved, improved, and optimised, alongside broader demographic narratives that frame declining reproductive capacity as a potential threat to future populations. Within these discussions, men are increasingly constituted as reproductive subjects whose bodies can be monitored, modified, and enhanced. Yet this emphasis on improving male reproductive capacity sits alongside a strikingly different representation of men once infertility is diagnosed. Across clinical and social accounts, male infertility is frequently approached through the language of deficit, loss, vulnerability, and incapacity. What would it mean to develop a strengths based approach to male infertility? (read more...)
One day in November 2022, I was meeting with Carolina, one of the main activists of the gig worker union Frente de los Trabajadores de los Plataformas Digitales del Ecuador (FRENAPP) in Ecuador. Carolina was using Canva (a free online graphic design website) to create sample book covers. She had just found a template featuring an epic-looking rendering of the Earth. “Let’s add the different types of gig workers to the top of the world,” she said. She took her time scrolling through different free clipart websites until she was satisfied with the images she pasted on top of the globe (Figure 1). She inserted a placeholder title for the book: “La Precarización en las Empresas de Plataformas a Nivel Mundial” (Precarization in Digital Platform Companies at the Global Level). She included slogans at the top of the sample book covers which translated to “An exploitation with a new economy,” and “If the precarization is global, the fight is international.” She credited the slogans to an international alliance of gig worker organizations of which FRENAPP was a part. In the sample book cover Carolina created, the viewer and the clipart gig workers lie outside of the stylized image of the whole earth. The globe becomes the prominent scale, superseding national borders, buildings, and neighborhoods. Images such as this call the scale of the global into being and visually assert the connection between the cause of gig workers and the scale of the world as a whole. The title of the book reinforces the idea of the global scale. (read more...)
Digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have offered methodological opportunities for connection, data collection, and the democratization of knowledge production, in part because they are easily accessible and affordable. These advantages notwithstanding, we must critically reflect on the limitations and ethical implications of these digital platforms (Leurs, 2023; Lintner, 2025; Mavhandu-Mudzusi et al., 2022). This is especially true regarding concerns about data sensitivity, data surveillance, and data security and storage by third-party providers (Leurs, 2023; Tomás & Bidet, 2024). Given the heightened ethical scrutiny surrounding the use of social media as tools of research, it is likely that scholarship and ethics committees will continue to critically assess the use of platforms such as WhatsApp, despite its accessibility to many (Lavorgna & Sugiura, 2022; Wilson et al., 2026). (read more...)
In Season 2 of the show Ramy, two Muslim American men perform umrah (the minor pilgrimage to Mecca) while sitting in an Atlantic City hotel room. Ramy is known for its bold and subversive humor in the way it addresses Muslim American identity and experiences. In this episode, two of his friends wear VR headsets. One of them, Mo, tearfully embraces the wallpaper, which his goggles have transformed into the Ka’ba, Islam’s holiest site. His friend Ahmed whispers, “It’s a miracle, subhanallah,” then adds, “and you don’t have to worry about your sandals getting stolen at the haram!” Ahmed’s joke about germs and stolen sandals acknowledges the absurdity. Mo’s tears—while also absurd—demand that we take the scene a bit more seriously. Can a pixelated Ka‘ba elicit immanence (divine copresence) or does it mostly just parody a sacred ritual? If time resists digitization even as space becomes malleable (McGlotten 2013, 46), and “time is not a semiotic isolate” (Agha, 2007, 320) how might the concept of chronotope, the intrinsic connection between time and space be useful in thinking about religious practice and the digital? Through this seemingly absurd example of a VR pilgrimage, we might better understand the notion of chronotope as it relates to the digital and how, through affect and copresence, the sacred becomes immanent (and perhaps transcendent) in new configurations, even as time “resists” digitization. (read more...)
