CASTAC
@castac
Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, part of the GAD of the American Anthropological Association | castac.org
What does it take to return to a field site, year after year? Mayline Strouk traces the fragile alignments between seabirds, researchers, and funding that sustain long-term ecological monitoring in Iceland. blog.castac.org/2026/08/frag...
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.
What do AI systems miss when they learn African languages? New on Platypus, Mpho Primus and Siri Lamoureaux explore why language is more than text - and why context, culture, and relationships matter for ethical AI. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/07/auto...
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.
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...
Today on Platypus, @abhigya.bsky.social discusses contestations around the EU Nature Restoration Law in Czechia and shows how these debates highlight the contradictions of interest-group mobilisation in scientific controversies. Read and listen: blog.castac.org/2026/07/char...
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.
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-...
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.
Microbiome science begins with cold hands and a barcode that has to survive the wind. New on Platypus, @victor.secco@bsky.social follows sampling expeditions on the Belgian coast to trace the invisible labour that turns soil and water into data — and asks who gets the credit.
Can anthropology's colonial legacies be reassembled on crip time? A new post on Platypus by Seon Shim traces disability anthropology as a practice of taking up space where and how it is not expected — arriving late, moving slowly, and building toward crip futures.
🎙️ New Platypod episode! Dr. Ana Carolina de Assis @anthrotechana.bsky.social talks with Dr. Luis Felipe R. Murillo about Common Circuits, his book on minor computing communities and the alternative futures they make possible against AI's enclosure of knowledge. 🎧 blog.castac.org/2026/06/plat...
Why study smell in clothes? A new RAFeCT post on Platypus explores smelling someone else's garments as a way of approaching absence, memory, and intimacy. blog.castac.org/2026/06/why-...
Today on Platypus, Şafak Kılıçtepe and Emine Onculer Yayalar explore the governance of bodies in Türkiye's hybrid medical landscape. blog.castac.org/2026/06/betw...
Today on #Platypus, Vageesh Vishnoi (@vageesh.bsky.social ) asks what ethnographic fieldwork looks like in a platform economy.
Today on #Platypus, Leonardo Thibau presents a multimodal critical cartography of the "Canal do Búfalo" forum, tracing how Brazil's early manosphere used toponymic aliases to frame belonging, resentment, and masculinist truth-making online. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/cart...
Today on #Platypus, Aylar Abdolahzadeh traces what ancient campfire debris reveals about human resilience. From striking sparks to keeping a flame alive, fire is a learned skill, and archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals used it flexibly. Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/trac...
Today on #Platypus, Alejandro Cerón examines how epidemiologists navigate the tension between technical expertise and political objectives towards outbreak mitigation, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala and the enduring myth of John Snow. Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/outb...
Today on #Platypus, Ana Paula Perrota, @leodupin.bsky.social and Rosângela Cintrão explore how industrial sanitary norms render traditional food cultures illegal in Brazil, and what that reveals about whose knowledge counts in global food safety regimes Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/food...
Today on #Platypus, Debjani Chakraborty explores how mobile phone affordances are reappropriated across rural Indian contexts, sometimes as tools of navigation and aspiration, and at other times as mechanisms of surveillance and moral scrutiny. Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/dome...
#CASPR2026 is done. Thank you to our guests for their generous contributions and insights for anthropological work regarding technology and computing! We hope you had an enriching dialogue, and we look forward to keeping in touch with you on all our platforms! ❤️
#CASPR2026 "There are pockets of interventions for anthropology into tech and labor conversation, such as with policymakers. We can have anthropology in the center", is part of the breakout room on technology within anthropology reflection. "We need to remain hopeful" as an insight!
#CASPR2026 "How software has an AI component and how does that impact the knowledge we produce with ethnography", is a key idea of the Ethnography then and now breakout room led by Platypus Editor, Kim Fernandes.
#CASPR2026 We started our last section! Reporting on the breakout rooms On Worker Education the moderators reflect: "What are we teaching people and how in the classroom we design talk about tech culture and ways of relating on how to analyze objects and the labour dynamics behind them".
#CASPR2026 We are now discussing in different breakout rooms! How do anthropologists engage with AI tools, and how does it shape our relationship with data? How are design and communities changing? Room 1 "Ethnography Then an Now" Room 2 "Worker Education" Room 3 "Technology within Anthropology"
#CASPR2026 our panelists discuss how labor, scholarship, and community are all relevant to create a critical framework to understand technological changes and conversations. As David Nemer claims, "The path forward runs not into accommodation of big tech but in the presence with people, talking."