2024 in Review
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…
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…
Farming Fantasies “There will come a day,” proclaims the player character’s grandfather in the popular video game Stardew Valley, “when you feel crushed by the burden of modern…
The interaction of toxins on the production end and consumer end of fashion consumption. Have we ever considered how our clothes could impact our health? Could something as…
Meaningful Mealtimes Human and nonhuman lives may have first become closely entangled with the rise of agriculture as we raised both animals to eat and other animals that…
Authors’ Note: The following essay uses the words “women” and “girls” in order to mirror the phrasing and experiences of cited literature as well as the responses of…
This text explores the evolution of digital inequality, highlighting how emerging phenomena pose new challenges to digital inclusion, particularly with the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI…
On Saturday of Labor Day Weekend 2020, a situation was rapidly deteriorating north of Fresno, California. Sometime around 6pm on September 5, the Creek Fire started, gained momentum,…
Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the…
For some time now, my colleagues and I at Labirinto (Labyrinth, Laboratory of Socio-anthropological Studies on Technologies of Life, State University of Campinas, Brazil) have been discussing and…
Publishing is confusing and complicated. There are often barriers to understanding it fully. And the process is very rarely fully transparent. So, I’m sharing my experiences of the…
The warm December sun had only recently risen over Miami Beach when I found myself in the bustling halls of Art Basel Miami 2021, one of the world’s…
Common sense tells us that play and work are opposing categories. However, in our society we often encounter situations where the boundaries between these two categories become difficult…
A passage from the novel Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor reads: La Matosa was slowly dotted once more with shacks and shanties raised on the bones of those…
Geoengineering at the Arctic Circle I first heard about Solar Radiation Modification (SRM)—a form of geoengineering meant to address climate change through planetary cooling—during the 2023 Arctic Cir…
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…
Isolated during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to follow on Twitter (the social media platform now called X) a few scientists who were dedicating…
Graffiti on the facade of the building where one of the interviews was conducted. It features a drawing of a healthcare worker wearing a mask and cap, holding…
“This,” explained Chico Filho, gesturing to the lush, flowering Caatinga shrubland surrounding us, “is the bees’ pasture.” Chico Filho, a state extension officer and avid beekeeper, was reflecting…
Figure 1: The entrance of the museum at the metro station reads, “Learning is possible through encounters.” Multisensory Encounters with the “Others” Since February 2023, I hav…
Once a week, I get to play doctor. Setting aside the endless anki cards and slide decks familiar to all medical students in their preclinical training, I turn…
What does it mean to speak about the cloud? While the term tends to conjure images of fluffy white objects, the cloud in technological terms is a complex…