CASTAC

CASTAC

@castac.bsky.social

Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, part of the GAD of the American Anthropological Association | castac.org |

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CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

How does the proliferation of cosmetic surgery manifest in an industry that values youth and beauty? This week on Platypus, Rong Mu looks at how ageing sex workers in Singapore use cosmetic surgeries to constantly adapt their bodies to meet “market demand.” blog.castac.org/2026/10/unfi...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Maria Isabel Trivilin immerses readers in southern Brazil’s industrial broiler production, where broilers can’t even fend for themselves. Who is caring for whom, and who suffers from care’s violence, in a setting where death is the inevitable outcome? blog.castac.org/2026/10/broi...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Who do we listen with, and who counts as a maker of culture? Listening with Whales is a digital commons bringing scientific, ancestral, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and embodied ways of listening into conversation. Listen with us! blog.castac.org/2026/10/list...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

AI was supposed to make job hunting easier. So why did it feel like "putting out a fire with a bucket of fire"? New on Platypus, Anna Huntington reflects on nearly a year of unemployment: ghost jobs, automated resume screening, ChatGPT, and an increasingly impersonal hiring process.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

How do health interventions reproduce an imagined distinction between places even when everyday practices blur those boundaries? New on Platypus, Luisa Madrigal Marroquín maps this out through fieldwork on maternal health interventions in Guatemala. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/09/imag...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Male infertility is often understood through deficit, loss, and vulnerability. But what might become visible if we also attended to men's capacities, relationships, resources, and reproductive futures? New on Platypus. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyo...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Today on Platypus, Lucy Pei examines how gig worker activists claim the global scale. Corporate elites often dominate debates on the future of work; here, labor organizing builds alternate transnational imaginaries: blog.castac.org/2026/09/tran... #STS #Anthropology

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Catherina Wilson shows us how while WhatsApp can promote the inclusion of highly relevant analyses and insights by potential authors who feel excluded by academic (English) jargon, we need to critically reflect on its use and ethical implications. New on Platypus.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Ambar Reyes studies the lives and labor of delivery workers in New York City. She explores how systems designed for labor extraction are repurposed as infrastructures of care, accountability, and collective knowledge, connecting neighbourhoods and communities across national borders.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

How does "digital immanence" reframe intimacy with the divine? This post thinks with the linguistic anthropological notion of "chronotope" as it relates to the digital and the future of our ever-mediated religious practices. New on Platypus. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/09/time...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

What happens when we measure aesthetic experience with an electroencephalogram? Two workshops by the Interspecifics collective show that art and science produce productive friction, not synthesis. New on Platypus.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

¿Qué ocurre cuando medimos la experiencia estética con un electroencefalograma? Dos talleres de Interspecifics muestran que el cruce entre arte y ciencia produce fricción productiva, no síntesis. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/09/stra...

blog.castac.orgStrategies and Tools for Knowledge Generation in Art-Science | PlatypusTo what extent do measurements from an electroencephalography headset provide evidence of the aesthetic contemplation state of the person wearing it? In the 2015 neuroaesthetic research project Actio...
CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

In Mexico, the word quelite comes from the Nahuatl kilitl. New on Platypus, Aldo Palafox argues the declining use of quelites is best understood as a conflict between political ontologies, offering a critical perspective on narratives that reintegrate them into Mexican diets as native "vegetables."

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

On the surface, due diligence and ethnography share the same toolkit - the candid question, the pre-read, listening for what goes unsaid. This week on Platypus, Al Lim draws on his dual role as ethnographer and VC investor to trace where the two might split.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

In this post, Sridhar Raghavan traces coasts (karai) as produced by silt, sea and coastal engineering. As an agent of history, siltation in the Kaveri Delta renders the karai, where (post-)colonial engineering attempts control, as a site of dialectic of land and water.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

What does it mean when a game promises to listen? In China's romance games, virtual boyfriends hang on your every word, and the game studios say they do too. New on Platypus, Cathy Naijia Liu writes on how "being heard" turns into a demand players make on the companies behind the games.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Children are not passive recipients of new technology. New on Platypus, Manar Naser chronicles her experience with elementary-age students, who understand AI's taboo nature, call low-effort ideas AI slop, and reject data centers in their communities. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/08/the-...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

How can medicalization create spaces for women to freely explore their sexuality? New on Platypus, Neslihan Sen uses vaginismus as a lens in Turkey to analyze the paradoxical relationship between sexual agency and the medicalization of sexuality. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/08/from...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

In Networks of Knowledge Sharing, Jennifer Foley shares her personal journey of exploring mycelial logics and how they resonate with her experiences of resource sharing, writing, care work, and decentralized collaboration in academic spaces. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/08/netw...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

The first post in Labor Tech India's series on Platypus presents union organisers' perspectives on researchers' contributions to movement spaces, with suggestions to minimize research fatigue and facilitate collaborative engagements.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

లేబర్ టెక్ ఇండియా సిరీస్‌లోని మొదటి పోస్ట్, ఉద్యమ వేదికలకు పరిశోధకులు అందించే సహకారంపై యూనియన్ నిర్వాహకుల దృక్పథాలను తెలియజేస్తుంది.

blog.castac.orgPlatform Workers’ Organizing Diaries: Messages from Union Organizers to Researchers | PlatypusResearchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternatives and strengthening movements, by speaking to three gig worker-organizers from India - Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed. We ask them, how do they view the role of researchers in the gig worker organizing landscape? How can researchers best support gig worker unions? What should we keep in mind when embarking on such collaborations?
CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/08/plat...

blog.castac.orgPlatform Workers’ Organizing Diaries: Messages from Union Organizers to Researchers | PlatypusResearchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternatives and strengthening movements, by speaking to three gig worker-organizers from India - Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed. We ask them, how do they view the role of researchers in the gig worker organizing landscape? How can researchers best support gig worker unions? What should we keep in mind when embarking on such collaborations?
CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

Why aren't disease "hotspots" neutral descriptions of who is getting sick? New on Platypus, Katharina Rynkiewich examines the U.S. measles outbreak alongside frontline healthcare providers in South Florida to show how hotspot maps are sociotechnical and political objects.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

What does it mean to feel stuck when your field has already succeeded? New on Platypus, Sumin Myung follows South Korean forest scientists confronting a professional anxiety rooted in the very success of the country's reforestation since the 1970s. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/07/stuc...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

In League of Legends, the economy doesn't end at Riot's store. New on Platypus, Iván Flores follows the informal markets for skins, accounts, and coaching that make up its "digital porosity" - proof that corporate platforms are powerful, but never fully closed.

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

At Mumbai's Deonar dumping ground, the monster is not a swamp man. It is the unstable assemblage of plastics, marsh, damaged ecologies, and the labor of those who work there. New on Platypus, Adwaita Banerjee follows the ground that moves. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/07/the-...

CASTAC
@castac.bsky.social

AI will transform education. We've heard that for decades. New on Platypus, Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry use the lenticular cloud - stationary in appearance, constituted by continuous movement - to rethink EdTech's stuckness as a practice of repair rather than a failure of progress.