2025 in Review
Welcome to our annual wrap-up, where we share some highlights for CASTAC’s 2025 activities! We are grateful to for your generous engagement with our content this year, and…
Welcome to our annual wrap-up, where we share some highlights for CASTAC’s 2025 activities! We are grateful to for your generous engagement with our content this year, and…
Since my father’s diagnosis of lung cancer, my life has been haunted by something I cannot see. When the biopsy reported “airway dissemination positive,” I became consumed by questions:…
“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…
In spring of 2024, when green buds had already begun to appear even though light flurries were still falling in Rochester NY, I was slumped in the folding…
Many people in China have started buying residential apartments, not to live in, but to store the ashes of deceased family members. These are called bone ash apartments.…
We are in Ruzaevka, a small town near Saransk, the regional capital of Mordovia, Russia. Ham radio operator Dmitry Pashkov, photographer Sergei Karpov, and I climb the roof…
We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the…
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…
In late 2022, I was enjoying my last semester in the United States, before I headed to Brazil to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. I spent the fall break in…
Connect1d is a Canadian organization that was founded to involve the experiences of type 1 diabetics in research about type 1 diabetes. Its website states, “Many of us…
In a 1992 New York Times op-ed, Paul Lewis denounced the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to exempt genetically engineered crops from case-by-case review. He likened modern…
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…
“I don’t think I could ever be convinced to use an iPad as a replacement,” said Elisabeth Dorion [1], a songwriter, composer, and musician based in Toronto, in…
One sunny afternoon in March 2024, I walked into a flea market in Chengdu, China — a labyrinth of book stalls, shadowed corridors, and a handful of solitary…
This semester, I officially began my fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in the city of Bogotá. As part of an ethnography, I will be wandering through different neuroscience…
In Sweden, youth soccer is expected to be fun –but in a specific way. Rooted in the 19th-century idealization of amateurism over professionalism, fun in Swedish youth soccer…
In Val Verde, California, an unincorporated community just a few miles north of popular amusement destination, Six Flags Magic Mountain, it is possible to glimpse the top of…
On Monday, April 14th, my stomach sank as I read an e-mail from the principal investigators of a large-scale, multi-institutional project funded by the United States Department of…
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…
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…
Now that I’ve mentioned it to her, Ms. Pacidal—an Amis Indigenous woman in her 80s—starts to fiddle with the watch on her left hand. It has a black,…
Once considered a funny truth, Douglas Adams’s “three rules of technology”[1] now feels increasingly outdated—especially his claim that any technology introduced after age 35 is against the natural…
Silicon Valley is many things, but perhaps most importantly it serves as a symbol; a metaphor. In public discourse, Silicon Valley frequently represents a particular vision of technology…
Gun violence in the United States is a statistical crisis, a political flashpoint, and an everyday reality for millions. But what if we could play through its structural…