environment | Platypus

Food (In)Security Under the Microscope

 Leonardo Vilaça Dupin, Ana Paula Perrota, Rosângela Pezza Cintrão  June 2, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponivel em português.

In November 2025, in Rio de Janeiro, the seminar (in)SAM — “Food (in)Security Under the Microscope: Rethinking the Relationship Between Food Systems, Microorganisms, and Sanitary Norms” — brought together researchers from different countries and professionals from various fields of knowledge for two days, with the aim of contributing to the development of inclusive sanitary norms for non-industrial food production. The panel discussions, which featured social science researchers and leaders from traditional peoples and communities, addressed topics such as: challenges for multispecies planetary health and for promoting food and nutritional sovereignty and security; food, microorganisms, and sanitary regulations; biopolitics in global food systems, agribusiness, and the production of large-scale (in)securities; and methodological and interdisciplinary challenges for research and regulations involving microorganisms. (read more...)

Becoming Experts: Activists Working Against Science Based on Misinformation

 Kaitlyn Kathleen Rabach  May 22, 2026

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In County Donegal, Ireland, an estimated 30,000 buildings are crumbling due to governmental and commercial mishandling of building materials such as concrete. A lack of urgency in governmental response has left homeowners living with severe mold, electrical risks, structural cracks and the impending threat of their homes collapsing, see image below. Homeowners have described living in these homes as being in a constant state of fear—fear their homes will crumble on top of them but also fear that the government they once trusted “to do right by them” will never fix their homes. (read more...)

Salt: A Provocation

 Jackie Ashkin, Alexander Foster, Madeline Augusta Turner  May 18, 2026

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Salt. That everyday thing we use to season our meals, relax our muscles, or make our icy roadways safer to traverse. Salt is an inescapable part of human experience, and yet, as anthropologists, it often escapes our attention. In recent years, anthropologists have turned their attention to what Cymene Howe (2026) calls the ‘elemental’, referring to the objects and processes – often simultaneously both – that constitute the world. Ongoing environmental crisis means coming to experience the elemental in new ways, both within and around the body. Salt, or sodium chloride, is one of these elements. (read more...)

On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu

 Misria Shaik Ali  March 31, 2026

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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...)

Hawa-laat: Polluted Air in Delhi, India

 Vasundhara Bhojvaid  August 7, 2025

 यह पोस्ट हिंदी में भी उपलब्ध है ।

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In 2015, I was back in India’s capital city, Delhi after two years of fieldwork in villages in rural parts of the country. On my return, the city had changed. There was something different in the atmosphere, which was leading to far-reaching, unexpected effects. For instance, during my morning commutes as I turned on the radio to one of Delhi’s most popular radio stations the radio jockey blared every hour or so, ‘Hawa-laat’! The Hindi word Hawalaat translates as a prison. If the word is broken into two parts, Hawa and Laat, it signifies a kick by the wind, as Hawa means wind or air and Laat means a kick. The radio jockey called out the word in a long and stretched manner to get the listener’s attention, slowly elongating the word ‘Hawaaaaaaaaa’ and then abruptly ending with a forceful ‘Laat!!!’, bringing out the potency of the wind (air) kick we were all getting. Following this, air pollution levels were detailed, and listeners encouraged to indulge in carpools and get their vehicular pollution levels checked. (read more...)

Technics in the Dust

 Spencer Kaplan  July 22, 2025

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One early morning in August 2024, I boarded a coach bus in downtown San Francisco. We drove over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, past Reno, and through the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation. After six hours, the bus entered the Black Rock Desert and arrived at Burning Man: an annual, week-long event where 63,000 “Burners” create a temporary city dedicated to art, self-expression, decommodification, and self-reliance. (read more...)

Submarine Cyborgs: At Sea with Haraway and Jue

 Elexis Williams Gray  June 24, 2025

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It is a Tuesday in May in upstate New York, and the world is greening all around me. A little rain falls from a clouded-over sky scattering bright neon gray light wherever it catches. Don’t be fooled by the stacks of books and papers beside my desk, or the false chiming of distant bells at the window. I am hunting a creature of the sea – a hybrid species, intimate with the queer spatialities of submarine worlds, the manfish. (read more...)

The Porosity of Promise: Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and the New Science of Technofixation

 Aaron Gregory  May 29, 2025

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Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2 and an expanding array of technoscientific actors and interests. (read more...)