Venture Capital’s Due Diligence, or Ethnography’s Adversarial Twin?
On a crypto builders’ night in late September 2023, I lingered in the crowd after the event. It was hosted in a crypto company’s newly renovated office in…
On a crypto builders’ night in late September 2023, I lingered in the crowd after the event. It was hosted in a crypto company’s newly renovated office in…
It is the third of our four days at the 2026 ST&HV Science and Technology Studies (STS) School. We file past laboratories populated by white-coated researchers and take…
Imagine that every time you poop, your hygiene routine involves depositing your used toilet paper into a toilet-side receptacle. As you wash your hands, the device mixes, processes,…
In County Donegal, Ireland, an estimated 30,000 buildings are crumbling due to governmental and commercial mishandling of building materials such as concrete. A lack of urgency in governmental…
Donna Haraway opens When Species Meet with the proclamation that “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane…
An aerial view of the Strait of Gibraltar shows something that resembles order. Container ships move in two disciplined lanes, their wakes parallel lines across the surface. Between…
At India’s southern tip, eight reactor buildings line the shore of the coastal communities of Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu—one of the four districts my family and I call…
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…
The Akai Music Production Center (MPC, formerly known as the MIDI Production Center) is a series of sequencers/samplers/interfaces first designed by Roger Linn and released in 1988 to…
As pandemic restrictions began to ease in late 2021, the annual Finnish startup conference Slush made its return as an in-person event. Held for the first time in…
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…
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…
In 2015, I was back in India’s capital city, Delhi after two years of fieldwork in villages in rural parts of the country. On my return, the city…
It is a Tuesday in May in upstate New York, and the world is greening all around me. A little rain falls from a clouded-over sky scattering bright…
Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecula…
It is late March 2022, and as always the weather is sunny in Tucson, Arizona. But a big meeting gathers a binational party inside an air-conditioned building on…
Next month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first ever working draft of our species’ entire genetic code. It was a major milestone in the Human Genome Project…
On the May 12th, 2025 cover of Time Magazine, you will see a picture of a white wolf below the bold word Extinct slashed through with a red…
This is the Introduction post to our new SEEKCommons series. The posts in this series are forthcoming, and will be linked here in this Introduction as they are…
As I became acquainted with social studies of science and technology, particularly through anthropological research, I realized it opened new doors for me, offering fresh perspectives and…
View/Download the transcription for this episode. For this episode of Platypod, I interviewed space anthropologist Savannah Mandel about her new book Ground Control: An Argument for the End…
Graffiti on the facade of the building where one of the interviews was conducted. It features a drawing of a healthcare worker wearing a mask and cap, holding…
“There is nothing like an iPhone …to show people the problem…” -Alex Vitale, The End of Policing An ACLU volunteer hangs informational posters in downtown Houston. The top…
The entrance of the room where the Mocambo group works. Photo by the author. This essay is one of the results of a roda de conversa (a conversation…