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…
Tag: General
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…
Little Experiments in Worldmaking with Amor Mundi Lab
The AMOR MUNDI Multispecies Ecological Worldmaking Lab transpires as a collaborative space for emerging scholars, artists, scientists, and practitioners of all kinds working in the Global South with…
Uncovering Ethnography in Creative Practice Research with Machines
A live performance of Oliver Bown’s Zamyatin system with clarinetist François Houle This blog post comes out of a discussion with Ritwik Banerji about the ‘hidden’ role of…
Beauty Filters: New Tech, Old Problems
Retaining a youthful appearance is a laborious and painful exercise, often rife with invisible labor. Digital beauty tech has made it much easier. Rather than altering our own…
You Are What You Grow: Crops, Cultivation, and Caste in India
The allure of the onion Fieldwork can produce odd obsessions. As an anthropologist studying agrarian risk economies, mine was onions. In the central Indian region of Malwa where…
Toxicity, Violence, and the Legacies of Mercury and Gold Mining in Colombia
Stubborn substances and toxic legacies Toxic substances are often portrayed as stubborn molecules that resist being restricted to the places where we would like to contain them in…
Platypod, Episode Five: CASPR – CASTAC in the Spring 2022
This episode presents a recording of CASPR 2022, or the CASTAC in the Spring 2022 mentoring event, organized to encourage dialogue on breaking down binaries that have separated…
LaMDA and the Limits of Sentience
In early June, Blake Lemoine, then an engineer at Google, claimed that LaMDA, a Machine Learning-based chatbot, was sentient and needed to be treated with respect. LaMDA stands…
Embracing Black Positionalities, (Re)Centring Slowness: A Challenge to Anthropology’s Anti-Racism Efforts
Anti-racism efforts remain highly problematic. As anthropologists, we are usually aware of the violent, colonial, and genocidal histories of research on ‘race’ and realities of racism which have…
New project in evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology
Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash. As a cultural anthropologist, I am thrilled that cultural variation is increasingly recognized as significant in a wide range of fields, cognitive…
Generations: A Review of AusSTS2022 in Melbourne
In July 2022, early career and PhD Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars met across four locations in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) for the fourth Australasian STS…
All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa: Building Colonies without Colonization
First edition cover of 2010: Odyssey Two where the quote “all these worlds are yours except Europa…” is from. Beneath Europa’s frozen surface is an ocean thought to…
Photoshopping Desire: Gender, Caste, and the “Authentic” Self
Screenshot of the comments for the post by @photo_paparazzo, being discussed in the blogpost In an Instagram post by a photographer @photo_paparazzo, we see what the labor of…
Bioethics Must First Burn
Bioethics must burn before it can be reimagined to enable the flourishing of all humans, and not just the ones that align with or are presupposed by its…
Interactive Science Museums: Replicating Science Without a Context
“We want a different museum. One where people are not afraid to interact with the objects” were the words[1] of one of the promoters of the ITINTEC museum,…
PrEP on Trial: the Future of HIV in Indonesian Policy Worlds
In 2012, the first pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drugs, billed as a pill a day to prevent HIV, were authorized for use in the United States. Heralded as a…
Platypod, Episode Two: Ableism in Anthropology and Higher Ed
In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Laura Heath-Stout (Brandeis University) and Rebecca-Eli Long (Purdue University). They discuss their research and experiences of ableism in ac…
Counting on Montane Birds: Biologists, Verticality, and Territorial Defense in Colombia
This piece is about the unforeseen and sometimes overlooked connection between (i) birds living in the forests of Colombia’s high tropical Andes, (ii) local biologists supporting an anti-mining…