kinship | Platypus

The Practice of Not Knowing

 Maythe Han  September 17, 2024

This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with a senior and reactive dog. It touches on the core themes of uncertainty and unknowability—and by extension, speculative imagination—inherent in multispecies entanglements, tying it inextricably to the preemptive grief that arises from living with a senior, and increasingly tired, dog who no longer has the same energy he once did, especially when faced with a motorcycle. It engages with the various emotional valences of everyday life shared with a nonhuman companion. The comic has two pages and 11 panels. It is drawn digitally on a white background with black 6B pencil brush on a tablet. Panel 1: I don’t know where Frank, my nine-year-old collie, has been for the first two years of his life. (Drawing of a young border collie puppy) (read more...)

Bed-Time Storytelling

 Fei Yuan  March 12, 2024

한국어번역글은 여기에 있습니다

 Listen to a reading of this post.

Bedtime stories are stories narrated by adults to children before they fall asleep. As an essential parenting skill, the storytelling scene is infused with love and trust. These stories make the transition from day to night easier. Rest well, tomorrow will be another day. In this piece, I wish to introduce an alternate narrative form I have named bed-time-storytelling—a practice of care born within the confines of hospice care beds. This approach redefines our understanding of storytelling, bridging the realms of the living and the departing, and opening a new chapter on how we engage with tales shared in the threshold between two worlds. (read more...)

Thinking with a Database

 Zehra Hashmi  May 6, 2021

In 2019, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority notified television channels that they were not allowed to host the Pakistani Senator Hafiz Hamdullah on air. The reason: Hamdullah had been declared a “confirmed alien,” and his identity card had been “digitally impounded” by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). NADRA began operations in 2000 by launching a biometric (fingerprints, facial, and iris recognition) computerized national identity card (CNIC). At NADRA, custom-made software integrates and verifies data from individuals as well as kin units, determining who is and is not a Pakistani citizen. (read more...)

Representing Diverse Bodies in Medical Illustration

 Drew Danielle Belsky  October 22, 2019

In 2016, just before I began my dissertation fieldwork, a trio of young medical illustrators presented a panel on “Normativity and Diversity in Healthcare Imagery” at the annual meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI). According to those who were at the meeting, the presentation was well-attended, but contentious. Among other statistics, the presenters pointed out that although the profession and the organization are at least 70% women, men often dominate awards and positions of power, and the vast majority of members are white. The panel’s presentations addressed not only the demographics of the profession but also social inequalities arising from the prevalence of the “able-bodied, attractive/thin, young, cisgender” white male body as “standard” in medical images. In a moment of informal conversation that fall, a friend of one presenter told me that they had been convinced that the “Diversity” presentation would likely result in cutting ties with the organization altogether. She gestured dramatically, coupled with a sound effect as though dropping a bomb. (read more...)