Search Results for: CASTAC

Happy Birthday to The CASTAC Blog! We Need YOU!

Patricia G. Lange November 5, 2013

Well, this week marks The CASTAC’s Blog’s first birthday, and I think cake is in order! I’m ordering chocolate of course! It has been a wonderful and exciting year as we have kicked off a new blog that is dedicated to exchanging ideas about science and technology as social phenomena. We thank everyone who has posted about their research or their opinions on a staggeringly impressive range of topics, from drones to steampunk! I look forward to all the wonderful posts and commentary that we’ll see in the coming year! The CASTAC Blog is now working through some growing pains! We are pleased to announce that it is time to expand our team! We are seeking 6-7 Associate Editors and 1 Associate Web Producer to ensure the continuously high quality of content that you’ve come to expect from The CASTAC Blog. The job duties and descriptions are as follows: Associate (read more...)

share

CASTAC: Past, Present, Future

Chris Furlow February 19, 2013

As a longtime CASTAC member, I’d like to offer my take on where we’ve been and where we, as an organization might go in the future. My first encounter with CASTAC came at the 1992 AAA meetings in San Francisco. I was a new grad student of Gary Downey’s in the STS program at Virginia Tech; however, CASTAC had been founded earlier. The following brief history is based primarily on “corridor talk,” oral histories passed along informally at AAA meetings and other fora by folks like David Hakken, Lucy Suchman, Julian Orr, David Hess and others. CASTAC, as an organization, began as CAC (Committee for the Anthropology of Computing) at the initiation of David Hakken and a few other anthropologists who were pioneering anthropological studies of computing. David approached Marvin Harris who was, at that time, the President of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) about creating CAC as a Committee (read more...)

share

Call for STM/CASTAC Panel Collaboration

Patricia G. Lange December 20, 2012

The Science, Technology & Medicine special interest group on the Society for Medical Anthropology is interested in collaborating with CASTAC to put together a double panel for the 2013 AAA meeting in Chicago. We will be putting out a call for abstracts for the panel in a few weeks. In the meantime, we are seeking a co-organizer for the panel from the CASTAC membership. This position will include working with co-organizers from STM to invite senior scholars to participate in the panel, solicit and review abstracts from other potential participants, and help determine the final composition of the panel. Interested parties should contact Christine Labuski (chrislab@vt.edu) or Jennifer Jo Thompson (jjthomp@uga.edu) by December 28, 2012.   Working abstract: EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES, FUTURE PUBLICS In keeping with the 2013 AAA meeting theme of ‘Future Publics, Current Engagements,’ this double panel brings junior and senior scholars into dialogue in order to explore how current (read more...)

share

From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection

Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, Pat Kinley April 2, 2026
Este contenido también está disponible en español
Listen to a reading of this post.

This special series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. As disruptions to public health ripple through the healthcare landscape in the United States, and whilst the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to haunt our collective present, the fundamental terms or “keywords” through which we understand disease transmission demand ethnographically-grounded inquiry, critique, and theorization. The posts in this series look at how infectious diseases and their conceptualizations spread through space and time, as well as how ethnography can articulate the expansive, lived realities of infection. (read more...)

share

De los Focos de Contagio a los Brotes: Palabras Clave para (des)anclar el Espacio, la Temporalidad y los Límites de la Infección

Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, Pat Kinley April 2, 2026
This content is also available in English.
Listen to a reading of this post.

Esta serie especial examina los límites espaciales, temporales y conceptuales de la infección. Como enfoque analítico principal, los autores de esta serie desglosan palabras clave de la epidemiología como brote, foco de contagio y epidemia, para evaluar su comprensión, uso y significado entre los científicos, los profesionales de la salud pública, los cuidados médicos, expertos y el público en general. A medida que las disrupciones en la salud pública se extienden por el panorama sanitario de Estados Unidos,  y mientras la pandemia mundial de COVID-19 sigue acechando nuestro presente colectivo, los conceptos fundamentales a través de los cuales entendemos la transmisión de enfermedades exigen una renovada investigación, basada en la etnografía, además de una crítica y una teorización. Las publicaciones de esta serie abordan cómo las enfermedades infecciosas y sus conceptualizaciones se propagan a través del espacio y el tiempo, así como la forma en que la etnografía puede dar voz a las realidades vividas de la infección, las cuales se expanden constantemente. (read more...)

share

On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu

Misria Shaik Ali March 31, 2026
Listen to a reading of this post.

At India’s southern tip, eight reactor buildings line the shore of the coastal communities of Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu—one of the four districts my family and I call home. These reactor buildings are of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), envisioned to be India’s largest nuclear park. People living in the nearby Idinthakkarai and Kootapalli villages mock the association of a risky technoscientific complex to anything close to a ‘park,’ or poonga—a forest or garden of flowers, in Tamil. The sea that rolls against the compound of KKNPP is where women protestors claimed that they derived their energy to lead the protest against the plant in March 2011. Following suit, fishermen rowed and drove their boats into the sea to protest the commissioning of the plant. (read more...)

share

The Human Cost of Precision

Samiksha Bhan March 24, 2026
Listen to a reading of this post.

In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage. When in 2017, Nadella delivered a talk about the use of assistive artificial intelligence for people suffering from disabilities like CP, he was contacted by one his colleagues in Spain. Julián Isla, a software engineer at Microsoft, emailed Nadella out of a sense of resonance, because his own son suffered from a rare genetic epilepsy making him a parent of a child living with disability as well. Like Nadella, Isla was also motivated to think of the role of artificial intelligence in the assistance of other parents who, as he described, were on the “odyssey of diagnosis”. (read more...)

share

Love at First Sprout: Wild Peanuts and Mars’ Plan for Climate Security

Eva Steinberg March 18, 2026
Listen to a reading of this post.

An animated peanut with a bowler hat and a white beard sits on one side of a campfire, opposite three smaller peanuts grinning back at him adoringly. Amid the chirping crickets and the crackling of the fire, the older peanut calls out: “Gather round my little legumes, it’s story time!” A small redheaded pod responds, “Grandpa, tell us the M and M’s story again.” Grandpa responds in a chiding tone: “We’ll get there! But, let’s start at the beginning…” (read more...)

share