STS | Platypus

Common(s) in Science and Technology? Dispatches from the SEEKCommons Network

 Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Matias Milia  December 17, 2024

This is the Introduction post to our new SEEKCommons series. The posts in this series are forthcoming, and will be linked here in this Introduction as they are published over the next several months. What does the “common(s)” mean for the present and future of science and technology? Are there novel dynamics at play in how knowledge infrastructures are being built, controlled, and contested today? It is with the goal of exploring these interconnected questions that we conceived of the Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) network—a collective platform where the “common” stands as a political horizon for collaborative social, technical, and environmental work. (read more...)

Connections between Health, Science, and Technology: What Does Anthropology Have to Do With It?

 Hellen Caetano  November 12, 2024

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

As I became acquainted with social studies of science and technology, particularly through anthropological research, I realized it opened new doors for me, offering fresh perspectives and new possibilities for conducting scientific research. During my graduate studies, I sought to bring together two fields that had always intrigued me: the anthropology of health and the social studies of science and technology. In recent years, I have focused specifically on the regulation of cannabis derivatives for therapeutic use in Brazil. This topic, which naturally sparks heated debates and strong opinions, is fraught with controversies (Latour, 2012), especially regarding cannabis’s historical role, nationally and internationally, as both a recreational drug and a medicine. To delve deeper into these controversies, I decided to conduct research that would focus on public health discourses and scientific practice around cannabis, incorporating the Brazilian debate on public safety. The discussion of health and public safety is deeply tied to the unique position cannabis holds in Brazil. When legislators or civil society engage in debates about cannabis, distinctions between recreational and therapeutic uses often blur. One form of use tends to receive greater moral acceptance, while the other is frequently disqualified. Thus, any conversation about regulating cannabis as a health technology must consider its social and political classifications and the perceptions surrounding it. (read more...)

Space Anthropology with Savannah Mandel

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes  September 4, 2024

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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...)

Foucault, Dialectics, and Randomized Clinical Trials: Bridges Between Medicine and Anthropology

 Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob  August 29, 2024

English

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Well, actually, I think I really wanted to understand how you guys conduct research. So, I read some articles in anthropology and sociology back when I was in medical school, and I remember three things: First, that dialectics always came up. That word was always there… The other was that Foucault was always cited. And the third, well, I couldn’t understand what was written. Those are the three things I remember: Foucault, dialectics, and that I couldn’t understand it, but I knew it was important, and I wanted to learn. So actually, I think to answer your question, I’d love to see the kind of product you generate… to understand how you work in a broader sense. Moving away from this specific research, when I saw , it was this morning when I told you I was looking at your Lattes profile, and I sent a message to Soraya. (Excerpt from an in-person interview with Afonso conducted at a public university on October 3, 2022) Interconnections, possible dialogues, and translations. These are the three key points highlighted in Afonso’s words during an interview that contributed to my dissertation, defended in June 2024 as part of a graduate program in anthropology at the University of Brasília, Brazil. And these are also key elements for this post, where I will be arguing how we, anthropologists, can build bridges with other fields of science. However, before diving in, I will present the context of the interview with Alfonso, the work that generated the dissertation, and the adjacent reflection that produced this post. (read more...)

To Witness: Cell Phone Cameras, Immigrant Communities, and Police Accountability

 Jessica L. Olivares  July 2, 2024

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“There is nothing like an iPhone …to show people the problem…” -Alex Vitale, The End of Policing As I contemplate the momentum of the 2024 presidential election cycle, my focus turns to the potential consequences of a renewed Trump presidency. Drawing on my expertise as an ethnographer, I recall the socio-technological impacts of his initial presidency, which fueled activism and organizing for civil liberties. What follows is a reflection on my fieldwork in Houston, Texas during 2018 and 2019, focusing on how anti-surveillance advocates at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas used cell phones and their cameras as resistance tools. The ACLU has been an active proponent for those in need of protection from government surveillance by educating people in the US on their constitutional rights, advocating for the protection of civil liberties, and taking legal action to stop violations of those rights and liberties. During my eighteen months of research, I engaged with anti-surveillance advocates at the national, state, and city levels who prepared organizing efforts and legal cases limiting unlawful surveillance capabilities. For this piece, I focus on promoting cell phone camera usage in ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” workshops and through the ACLU Blue and ACLU La Migra mobile applications. Throughout the piece, I reckon with what Deborah Thomas calls “the often difficult-to-parse relationships between surveillance and witnessing” (2000, 717). Witnessing the precarity of past ethnographic junctures can highlight injustices, bring them to attention, and formulate strategies for their alleviation. Thus, bearing witness to the past moments may help gain agency over unpredictable futures. (read more...)

Between the Bitterness of Anonymity and Ethics is Racism: Reflections for Anthropological Research on Science in the ‘Backyard’

 João Paulo Siqueira  June 20, 2024

Esse conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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This essay is one of the results of a roda de conversa (a conversation circle) that took place at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, in December 2023. Professor Soraya Fleischer had the idea and invited her advisees: two men and three women. Since all of us were, in different ways, doing research with researchers that were also working at the University of Brasilia, the roda de conversa had as a guiding theme the following question: what is it like to conduct research with interlocutors who share the same “institutional house”—who work in the same “backyard”? (read more...)

“We had to rethink many, many things”: Reflexivity in Scientific Practices during the Zika Epidemic in Recife, Brazil

 Thais Valim  April 25, 2024

Esse conteúdo também está disponível em português

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Luiza is a pediatrician and researcher specializing in infectious diseases who works at a teaching hospital in Recife, Brazil. Her daily routine involves treating children with congenital infectious syndromes, which can lead to various clinical conditions including microcephaly. However, in October 2015, an unprecedented situation unfolded. As she described during an interview with me, “That year, a new world entered my world.” She was referring to the surge in cases of microcephaly that puzzled Brazilian doctors and health authorities that year. In Recife, where the average number of microcephaly cases historically stood at nine cases per year, there were twelve cases registered in just one maternity ward within a month. (read more...)

Lonely Planet Looking for Connection: Citizen Science SETI Research at NASA

 sebastian levar spivey  February 20, 2024

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NASA’s homepage is as glitzy as you would expect of the U.S. Government’s sexiest administration. Glossy pictures of nebulas, astronauts, and asteroids float across the top of the page and even the ozone hole over Antarctica manages to look like a snack. A quick swipe over to the Citizen Science Page, however, and now the images give enthusiastic, low-res, DIY vibes coupled with pun-filled project titles like “Aurorasaurous” and “Spiritacular.” Each one beckons: anyone with a cellphone or a laptop can do this project. A Jacob’s Ladder of binary stretching into the blurry heavens stops my scroll with its provoking title—Are we alone in the universe? Well golly, I don’t know. Go to Project Website. So I do. (read more...)