ethnography | Platypus

Domesticating Affordances: From Surveillance to Navigation of Interfaces, How Affordances Are Reappropriated across Contexts by Rural Indian Women

 Debjani Chakraborty  May 29, 2026

Joginder Kaur (54) had no formal schooling. For her, phone calls always meant pressing the green button to receive a call. Dialling numbers or navigating menus were not part of that routine—until they became unavoidable. In came emojis, used to mark different people in her contact list: Birds, hearts, and just a smiley face. Each representing a new contact. (read more...)

Introducing Citizen Technology: Ethnographic Insights from Makerspaces

 Sandrine Lambert  May 25, 2026

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When I first arrived at the makerspace known as Fab Casa del Mig, in the Sants neighborhood of Barcelona, I crossed a large urban park called La España Industrial. I later learned that the park occupies the site of a former textile factory with the same name. Walking through the park, I passed people walking their dogs, groups playing basketball or pétanque, and others simply spending time with their family there. At the end of the park stands Fab Casa del Mig, the last remaining building of this former industrial complex. Inside, there is a large makerspace. (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...)

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

 Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich, Pat Kinley  April 2, 2026

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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...)

From the ‘Grid’ to the ‘Field’: Visualizing the Chipscene

 Marilou Polymeropoulou  December 16, 2025

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“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day I got in…” Kevin Flynn, Tron Legacy In Autumn 2008, while studying in Athens, I happened to attend an event called Error Code. The event’s poster lured me in as it depicted a Nintendo Game Boy connected to another electronic device and a keyboard. During the event, the three performers played their chiptunes – compositions which they had created live on Game Boy. Although the overall umbrella term for chiptunes would be electronic music, they all had very distinct styles, ranging from noise to electropop. (read more...)

The Ones Who Walk Away from the Internet

 Martina Di Tullio  October 31, 2025

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In the Andean cosmovision, constellations are not formed by connecting the dots of stars, but rather from the spaces of darkness in the night sky. The most important one is the Yakana, shaped like a llama —the most essential animal for life in the Andes (Zuidema & Urton, 1976). What might be seen as void, then, can reveal as much as, or even more than, the brightest star. (read more...)

Patch-“working” the Field: Methodological Reorientations During a Global Pandemic

 Anushree Gupta  July 29, 2025

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I began my doctoral journey right before the pandemic set in. My project was going to critically examine the notion of “technology for social good” within the hyper-charged tech startup and innovation ecosystem in a rapidly digitizing India. I wanted to examine how top-down imaginaries rooted in technocratic governance regimes were shaping emerging communities of practice and cultures of technology-based entrepreneurship. Deeply inspired by Ho’s (2009), Irani’s (2019), and Gupta’s (2024) ethnographies, I hoped to develop my research similarly through an in-depth investigation of techno-entrepreneurial cultures from within and examine their capture of the public imagination for charting pathways to economic growth and social mobility. The idea was to try and uncover the finer threads that were weaving the tapestry of neoliberal development in what would later be deemed as “pre-pandemic” India. Enter the pandemic and the paralyzing lockdown in March 2020 that brought “normal” life to a screeching halt. A sudden and totalizing isolation was mandated by the social distancing rules meant to keep the virus out. However, it didn’t keep the feeling of disaster at bay. The scenes that unfolded during the lockdown–on national television and social media screens, both closer to home as well as globally–demanded loudly and aggressively a reconsideration of everything important and urgent, and hence, worth studying. (read more...)