Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Confluences of the Domestic
Much of the water that enters homes in metro Guadalajara, Jalisco is toxic. Water from the tap is used to wash dishes and water plants, but for decades…
Tag: General
Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Aquatic Attractions
Forty years ago, four hippos arrived in Colombia. Drug trafficker Pablo Escobar illegally imported them as part of his project to build an open-door zoo at Hacienda Naples,…
Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Attend the Rains
Each night and day in the industrial port of Ciudad del Carmen (Campeche, Mexico), dozens of Pemex oil platform workers roll their small suitcases across the concrete as…
Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Water, Energy, and Youth in the Orinoco River, Colombia
July is part of the heavy rainfall season of South America’s northernmost savannas, known since colonial times as the Llanos (Plains/Grasslands) and, more recently, from a biogeographical perspe…
Audio Ethnographies of Water from Latin America: Introduction
Inspired by Feld’s (2015) work on sound, in this collection of essays, we bring five ethnographers from Latin America to think about their research through the sounds of…
Lonely Planet Looking for Connection: Citizen Science SETI Research at NASA
NASA’s homepage is as glitzy as you would expect of the U.S. Government’s sexiest administration. Glossy pictures of nebulas, astronauts, and asteroids float across the top of the…
Water Scarcity, Hydropolitics, and the Importance of Materiality at the Foothills of the Rocky Mountains
How is growing water scarcity experienced by livestock producers? And to what extent does the materiality of water and the infrastructures on which users rely influence social relations…
Platypus in 2024
Welcome to Platypus in 2024! We look forward to continuing to publish content on science and technology from anthropological and social science perspectives. We remain grateful to all our readers,…
2023 in Review
Image from https://stock.adobe.com/. Welcome to CASTAC 2023 in review! In this post you will read about the wonderful work that our CASTAC team and community has put together.…
Antti Lindfors Interviews Nicole Starosielski on Media Hot and Cold
This is a conversational interview between Professor Nicole Starosielski (UC Berkeley) and me, Dr. Antti Lindfors (University of Helsinki), discussing Nicole’s book Media Hot and Cold (2022, Duke…
Milei, Crowds, and Concrete Waves in Argentina
I am home, reading Stefan Helmreich’s new book, A Book of Waves (2023). The news on TV then catches my attention: I see images from the inauguration of…
Algorithmic Imaginations in Agriculture: Automation?
In 2022, I was conducting my doctoral dissertation research on data-driven, automated digital farming technologies (drones, autosteering, sensors, GIS, smartphones, Big Data) in Turkey. Amidst the glo…
High Costs, Entangled Politics: What All Comes Inside a Medication’s Packaging
On October 17th, 2023, two news articles about the Brazilian federal budget circulated on social media. One announced the freezing of R$116 million (US$23.3 million) from the budget…
Belly Versus Bin: How Digital Autoethnography Brought Me Back From the Brink of Disordered Eating
Content and Trigger Warning: This post contains commentary and reflections about disordered eating. Food(ie) Fixation In September 2019, I responded to an advertisement by a Dutch university for a…
On Algorithmic Divination
Scientist operating an algorithmic divination machine as imagined by Midjourney’s AI (image by Author & Midjourney). Algorithms are tools of divination.[1] Like cowry shells, scapular bones,…
Funeral for an Embryo
On a freezing February morning, I pulled my rental car into the small parking lot behind a sprawling Minnesota church. I had flown halfway across the country to…
How to Imagine the Unknown: Choosing an Arm Prosthesis
When amputation happens, it is an un-ignorable event. After the surgery, the person learns how to be an amputee, they learn to conceptualize their altered body. This work…
Staring Contest
It’s 3 in the morning. I’m sitting at the end of the hallway of the boomerang-shaped intensive care unit (ICU) where I work, looking into the darkness beyond…
The Wild Pantry
Plants and Their Stories Finally, it’s time. As a team we have arrived in Cambodia—a geographer and an anthropologist embarking on a journey that we have joyfully planned…
“The Day I Discovered I Was Collaborating on a Eugenics Project”: On Imponderables in Collaborative Research
The title that opens this reflection is a statement by computer scientist Sandra Avila, who is also a co-author of the lines that will flow here. Her account…
Making Companion Species at a Robotics Lab
I spent many a warm summer day holed up inside a robotics laboratory, analyzing various datasets for my Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research project. The room was often dark…
“Blooming Biomes Mean Blooming Profits”: ‘Nature-based’ Industrial Farming and the Politics of the Industrial Animal Microbiome
Industrial trade shows are curious places. Potential customers milling around more than 500,000 square feet of exhibit space; technoscientific exuberance and hype; snappy names and enticing displays; …
Cards Against Digital Anthropology
Suzana Jovicic*, Simone Pfeifer** In 2014, US-based associate anthropology professor Matthew Durington held a class on game design. One of the anthropology games developed by his students was…
Female Truck Drivers in China Navigate Gender Norms on Douyin
It’s dark outside: 4:34 AM. I am peering through a truck’s windshield, gazing at a seemingly endless stretch of highway. “Female truck driver Li Ping is live streaming,”…