The Human Cost of Precision
In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage.…
In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage.…
Emergent Southern Urbanisms: The Dynamics of Everyday City-Making When? 28-29 May 2026 Where? University of Helsinki, Main Building U3039 This two-day symposium is organised by the research projec…
Tässä podcast-sarjassa Helsingin yliopiston antropologian opiskelijat pohtivat yhdessä aktivistien kanssa vaihtoehtoisia polkuja kohti parempaa tulevaisuutta. Sarjassa kysytään, millaisia maailmoja me…
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…
When governments declare a climate “emergency,” they rarely name the real emergency at play – colonialism. Crisis-oriented language transforms centuries of dispossession, extraction, and ecological de…
By the time panic buttons were installed in buses, taxis, and autorickshaws starting in 2012, their deployment in Delhi’s public transit vehicles had already been under discussion for…
This article is the third in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction…
Over the past several years, menstrual and hormonal cycles have gained significant public attention across the US and Europe, concurrent with growing skepticism towards biomedicine and an idealization…
Welcome to Platypus in 2026! Last year, we published over 65 posts, almost a quarter of which were also in a second language, and maintained a readership from 175…
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…