Thinking, writing, and publishing from Latin America pose significant challenges, especially for younger researchers. Academic work is affected by various kinds of asymmetries, but when we add to…
Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories historically inhabited by peasant communities in Colombia. Desig…
Hội An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Quảng Nam province in Central Việt Nam. In the daylight, Hội An dazzles with architectural riches reflecting its…
Helping on a prescribed fire as a volunteer firefighter sometime in September, I felt the anticipation that had been building in our team dissipate as we learned that…
It is late March 2022, and as always the weather is sunny in Tucson, Arizona. But a big meeting gathers a binational party inside an air-conditioned building on…
Next month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first ever working draft of our species’ entire genetic code. It was a major milestone in the Human Genome Project…
“Hannah, roll a six!,” Mahad, Alliance Wellness recovery program resident, pleaded as the game of Ludo intensified. Ludo, a strategic and competitive board game, was popular among Somali…
The tension between binary thinking and the fluidity of identity has long been featured in discussions of definition in computational practice within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Nowhe…
Data centers are in the news. You have probably read or heard about them. It’s as if with the snap of a finger the news cycle has changed,…
Every Thursday at 9 o’ clock in the morning, housewives from a residential neighborhood on the outskirt of Jakarta gather at their usual spot at the “Love Earth”…
Rene Gomez was one of the most renowned potato curators at the International Potato Center (CIP, Centro Internacional de la Papa in Spanish). [1] Potato curators provide reliable…
Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming…
This article provides a brief look into the ways identity can be constrained with regard to biometric technology. It discusses technological limitations where biometric identification systems may fai…
Cast Your Vote (CYV), a civic education game, aims to teach conscious voter behavior to youth, simulating a fictional election campaign. Reflecting on the relationship between humans and technology, I…
“Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the…
Work on Artificial Intelligence writ large has moved past laudatory excitement to one of vast critique. This recent scholarship has demonstrated the various racist and sexist biases embedded…
This essay uses the demise of the cyborg candidate to challenge faith in social constructionism without an examination of how authenticity sows meaning. I begin by revisiting the…
At 09:30 a.m. BST on 19 July 2024, IT systems around the world suddenly ground to a halt. Without their computer systems, pharmacies, doctors’ surgeries, airports, train providers,…
Gripping tightly onto a walking stick, I slowly and precariously make my way through the forest. Careful not to catch my prosthetic foot on the exposed roots, I’m…
Welcome to Platypus in 2025! Last year, we published over 65 posts, almost half of which were also in a second language, and maintained a readership from 169…
Welcome to our annual wrap-up of CASTAC’s 2024 activities! We are grateful to all of you, our readers, for engaging with our content this year and we look…
Menstruation as a subject of study is not new. Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Bobel, Miren Guillo, and Karina Felitti, among many others, have discussed how menstruation has…
This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. On a cool autumn day in Vancouver, I…
As a growing area of inquiry in STS, maintenance studies brings two critical insights to the post-Actor Network Theory (ANT) landscape. First, relations are not a state of…