A Vocabulary for Junk in Four Movements
Deponie. /depoˈniː/ noun. (German for ‘landfill, dumpsite’) To put down, to place, to hand over, to trash; or, to otherwise find some new purpose for. Freude. /ˈfʁɔʏ̯də/ noun.…
Tag: General
Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Entropy: Internet and Synthetic Biology Pioneer Randy Rettberg’s Story on How Information Was Forged
Our first encounter with Randy Rettberg was somewhat surreal. Not that the others weren’t—the sui generis atmosphere is always present—but that first meeting was set in a scenario…
Making Bioethnographic Teams Work: Disciplinary Destabilization, Generative Friction, and the Role of Mediators
Increasingly, scholars across the life and social sciences recognize the necessity of multi-method, interdisciplinary research for its ability to adequately understand the world’s complex problems.[1]…
Becoming a Socialite: How Virtual “Fakeness” Produces Material Realities among Urban Chinese Gay Men
Real, Unreal, and Whatever Else In-between On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated.…
How Microbes Became Friendly: Visualizations of the Microbiome in Public Media
The biology, as astonishing as it is, does not tell us what it will mean. -Stephan Helmreich, “Homo Microbis” (2014, 4) Within microbiome research, the human body can…
Memorializing Eruption
Perched on a makeshift stage, a trio dressed in wool ponchos sings pirekuas, the region’s most acclaimed and loved musical genre in a mix of Purépecha and Spanish.…
Setting Traps: For an Insurgent and Joyful Science
While visiting the exhibition by the artist Xadalu Tupã Jekupé at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, one of the works caught my attention. It was…
“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”: Food, Cooking, and Eating in Video games
Pixelated Paradise “Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019) It is summer 2020…
Violence/Freedom: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance in Public Parks
Cities all over the world have witnessed a surge in the use of surveillance technologies, such as data-gathering phone apps, facial recognition software, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras…
Birding in Ruins: Multispecies Encounters and the Ecologies of Evidence
As we walked by some of the former shrimp ponds in an abandoned aquaculture farm, we approached a scene I easily overlooked until Julian asked me to document…
The Perfect Fit
In my new book, The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2022) I study the work of repair and maintenance necessary…
The Use of Patent Information to Investigate Algorithmic Systems
During my master’s degree, I wanted to study the idea that some social media platforms had tools for guiding users’ behavior in a certain direction. Even though this…
Making Forecasts Work: The Evolution of Seasonal Forecasting by Funceme in Ceará, Northeast Brazil
Every January, government officials, urban dwellers, and rural families across the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil anxiously await the rainy season forecasts from Funceme, the Research Institute for …
Digital Multiples and Social Media
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to…
Transpositioning, a Hypertext-ethnography
This is a work of hypertext-ethnography. It is based on my research of a small genetics laboratory in Tokyo, Japan where I am studying the impact of the…
Becoming the Game: Hardware Hacking, Agency, and Obsolescence
Introduction When I asked my aunt back in 2014 if my old Game Boy Color was still around, she handed it to me, but confirmed that the A…
Dining with the Diaspora: Khmerican Digital Gastrodiplomacy
During my first semester of undergrad, I began my truly independent cooking journey—a path many have taken before me, but few survive. After weeks of failing to replicate…
Invisible Labor of Health and the Spell of Productivity
When I talked with Jia, who works for an e-commerce company in Shanghai, China, she was trying to finish a “Perfect Month Challenge” on her Apple Watch. That…
As Above, So Below: Vertical Territory in Northern Sweden
Space exploration in northern Sweden often gains meaning in relation to mining. In this blog post, I ask: how does mining serve as a “speculative device” (McCormack 2018)…
Is it Going to Be Okay? / Est-ce que ça va aller?
Introduction This is is a multilingual comic that serves as a meditation on the infrastructures of COVID-19, care, and time. In the spirit of the multilingual spaces I…
Grafting with Care: Encountering Human-Plant Relations Through Experiments with Roses
Introduction When seen through the experiences and histories of experimentation and care, plants such as roses can bring new insights into the affective and material entanglements of more-than-human…
Platypus in 2023
Welcome to Platypus in 2023! We’re excited for another year of anthropological and social thinking around science and technology. Last year we had over forty-five posts on topics…
Reading Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism in a Chemistry Lab
Pollution is Colonialism book cover Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) uses plastics to trace pollution in fish stomachs in Newfoundland while showing how this pollution is embedded in…
A Concert in the Rainforest: Sound in Multispecies Ethnography
A Concert in Analamazaotra The four minute clip above was one of many that I recorded during preliminary fieldwork this past summer in the Eastern rainforest corridor of…