STS | Platypus

Microbes and the Permeable Body: Rethinking Health Through the Holobiont

 Bronte Jones  May 12, 2026

Donna Haraway opens When Species Meet with the proclamation that “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body” (Haraway, 2007). The rest of the human body is comprised of bacteria, viruses, archaea and other microorganisms – largely invisible to the human eye, but nonetheless living on and within us. In recent years we have seen a proliferation of research and attention towards these microorganisms, particularly in the gut, skin, lungs, and mouth, with each comprising their own microbiome. Although this research is still developing, it is increasingly clear that these microorganisms may actually be fundamental to the development and functioning of human bodies. (read more...)

What the Map Conceals: Sovereignty and the Sea in the Strait of Gibraltar

 Adam Matthew Mikhail  April 22, 2026

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An aerial view of the Strait of Gibraltar shows something that resembles order. Container ships move in two disciplined lanes, their wakes parallel lines across the surface. Between them, a single patrol vessel sits like a traffic cop at an intersection. Smaller ships move differently: ferries on fixed schedules, fishing boats angling across the grain, following lines invisible from above. The Strait, fourteen kilometers at its narrowest, appears split down the middle, dividing Morocco from Spain, Africa from Europe. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described the sea as the exemplary smooth space—fluid, directionless, resistant to the grid—but also as the first place to be striated, ruled into navigable geometry by technologies of longitude and open-water navigation. From above, the striae of the strait are clear. The question is what that striation conceals. (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...)

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

 Eva Steinberg  March 18, 2026

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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...)

Hip Hop Sampling and the Akai MPC as a Platform for Spatiotemporal Discourse

 Jonathan Givan  March 5, 2026

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The Akai Music Production Center (MPC, formerly known as the MIDI Production Center) is a series of sequencers/samplers/interfaces first designed by Roger Linn and released in 1988 to critical acclaim. The MPC series soon became one of the most influential technologies in modern music production. The flagship model, the MPC60, included many features that made it an immediate hit with artists: a 4 by 4 layout of comfortable pressure sensitive pads, 16 voice polyphony, 13.1 seconds of sampling, frequency response of 18kHz, and MIDI (an acronym for musical instrument digital interface, a protocol that allows electronic instruments to communicate with each other). These feature allowed for easy connectivity to other MIDI devices found in studios at the time like synthesizers and other samplers, high quality sampling and playback, and an instrument that feels good to play. (read more...)

Renouncing and Returning to Shareholder Value

 Sakari Mesimäki  November 18, 2025

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As pandemic restrictions began to ease in late 2021, the annual Finnish startup conference Slush made its return as an in-person event. Held for the first time in 2008, Slush grew through the 2010s to become a major international startup event with tens of thousands of attendees—a symbol of the “success story” of Finnish startup culture and a focus of national pride and economic hope. (read more...)

The Ones Who Walk Away from the Internet

 Martina Di Tullio  October 31, 2025

Este post también está disponible en español

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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...)

Dreaming of Security through Lanyards and Bollards

 Samuel DiBella  October 2, 2025

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A perimeter is always porous, to certain people. Managing how it is perforated is a kind of professional work. In my fieldwork at a casino, a guard all in black sheepishly hands out blank visitor IDs that we wear only in a closed room. He collects them on our exit to the floor and accompanies us up to the lobby bar because of regulations. In the discussion, a man expresses his exasperation at an embassy’s request for an ambulance during a US National Special Security Event. I don’t understand why he makes an ambulance sound so ominous—he says he didn’t sleep for days—until someone later explains to me that he was worried the ambulance would be filled with explosives and allowed to slip through security lines. In The Filing Cabinet, Craig Robertson describes how information architecture via office furniture soothed clerks of “the particular anxiety produced by the knowledge that paper records create an alternative paper-based reality to which officials defer” (pp. 253). With two tools, the lanyard and the bollard, I consider how security work engenders and manages similar anxieties about the inherent instability of persons and property. (read more...)