Following Primates
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…
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…
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…