Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

By CASTAC

Listen to a podcast, please open Podcast Republic app. Available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Image by CASTAC

Category: Social Sciences

Open in Apple Podcasts


Open RSS feed


Open Website


Rate for this podcast

Subscribers: 2
Reviews: 0
Episodes: 241

Description

Platypod is the official podcast of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. We talk about anthropology, STS, and all things tech. Tune in for conversations with researchers and experts on how technology is shaping our world. (Jingle by chimerical. CC BY-NC 4.0)

Episode Date
The Hotspot as a Sociotechnical and Political Object: Frontline Healthcare Professionals and Public Conversation alongside the Intensification of a U.S. Measles Outbreak
Jul 24, 2026
Stuck Among the Trees
Jul 22, 2026
Charting the (Dis)course of Nature Restoration: The EU Nature Restoration Law in the Public Sphere in Czechia
Jul 20, 2026
Digital Porosity and Value in Suspension: Informal Economies and Video Games
Jul 16, 2026
The Monsters We Buried: Plastics, Swamp Men, and the Unquiet Ground of Deonar
Jul 14, 2026
Is Edtech’s Stuckness a Kind of Fixation?
Jul 09, 2026
Searching for Microbes with No Name: The Labour of Sampling and the Making of Scientific Value
Jul 07, 2026
Collaborating with Precarity: Anthropology on Crip Time
Jul 02, 2026
Platypod, Episode Twelve: Hacking Alternative Futures
Jun 29, 2026
Why Study Smell in Clothes?
Jun 26, 2026
Between Cure and Care: Governing Bodies in Türkiye’s Hybrid Medical Landscape
Jun 24, 2026
Delivering in Delhi: Ethnographic Reflections on Working with the Food Delivery Platform
Jun 22, 2026
Becoming-with Mushrooms: Multispecies Collective Autoethnography for Reworlding Educational Environments
Jun 19, 2026
Noclipping into the Contemporary: Anthropology in the Backrooms
Jun 17, 2026
A Progress Without People: Six Decades of Living Next to India’s First Nuclear Power Plant
Jun 15, 2026
Viral Afterlives: Toponymy of Zoonotic Ruptures in West Malaysia
Jun 12, 2026
Cartographing the Brazilian Manosphere: Toponymic Aliases in a Public Forum
Jun 10, 2026
Tracing the Legacy of Human Resilience in the Debris of Ancient Campfires
Jun 08, 2026
Outbreak Mitigation at the Crossroads: Technical Expertise, Political Imperatives, and the Myth of John Snow
Jun 05, 2026
“Is This the End of Disability?”: Eugenics and the Technification of Normalization
Jun 03, 2026
Food (In)Security Under the Microscope
Jun 02, 2026
Domesticating Affordances: From Surveillance to Navigation of Interfaces, How Affordances Are Reappropriated across Contexts by Rural Indian Women
May 29, 2026
Why Do We Weave Networks? Mapping the Common Territory of Latin American Feminist Anthropology of Science and Technology
May 27, 2026
Introducing Citizen Technology: Ethnographic Insights from Makerspaces
May 25, 2026
Becoming Experts: Activists Working Against Science Based on Misinformation
May 22, 2026
“Tech-ing” the “Justice Gap” and/or (Re)imagining Access to Justice in Africa
May 20, 2026
Salt: A Provocation
May 18, 2026
Seeing, Acting, Believing: The CyberKnife and the Transformation of Medical Imaging
May 14, 2026
Microbes and the Permeable Body: Rethinking Health Through the Holobiont
May 12, 2026
Animals in War: Multispecies Agency and the Memory of the Colombian Armed Conflict
May 06, 2026
Making for the Feed: Creativity, Platforms, and Visibility in China
May 04, 2026
What Would Happen if Ethnographers Learned to Process Signals?
May 01, 2026
Blood Circulation: Opening Up a Closed System
Apr 29, 2026
What’s in a Name?
Apr 27, 2026
What the Map Conceals: Sovereignty and the Sea in the Strait of Gibraltar
Apr 22, 2026
Criminality, Risk, and Labor: Altruistic Surrogacy in Contemporary India
Apr 20, 2026
Data Borders: Three Years Later
Apr 14, 2026
Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: How Do They Shape Unionizing?
Apr 09, 2026
Techno-Ethics and Feminist AI: What Role for an African Studies Approach to Science and Technology?
Apr 07, 2026
From Hotspots to Outbreaks: Keywords for (Un)Grounding Space, Temporality, and the Boundaries of Infection
Apr 02, 2026
On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu
Mar 31, 2026
The Human Cost of Precision
Mar 24, 2026
Love at First Sprout: Wild Peanuts and Mars' Plan for Climate Security
Mar 18, 2026
Engineering Through Stuckness
Mar 10, 2026
Hip Hop Sampling and the Akai MPC as a Platform for Spatiotemporal Discourse
Mar 05, 2026
Series: Theorizing Stuckness in Science and Technology
Mar 03, 2026
There is a Climate Emergency, and It's Called Colonialism.
Feb 26, 2026
A Promise of Safety for Everyone, Anywhere, Any Time: The Panic Button, The City, and the Box
Feb 24, 2026
Transnational Translations: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Platforms and Labor
Feb 18, 2026
(Seed) Cycling Toward a Crossroads: Menstrual Positivity and Hormone Practices Under Right-Wing Regimes
Feb 04, 2026
Writing About/With Platform Unions: The Role of Culture, Politics, and History
Jan 28, 2026
The Lung Tumor We Know Exists Yet That We Cannot See
Dec 19, 2025
What Not To Do If You Are Accused Of Harassment: The Case Of Boaventura de Souza Santos
Dec 17, 2025
From the ‘Grid’ to the ‘Field’: Visualizing the Chipscene
Dec 16, 2025
Touch to Make: An Index Finger’s Path into the Sculpture Factories in China
Dec 12, 2025
Doing Research Between Adolescence and Cyborgs
Nov 26, 2025
Renouncing and Returning to Shareholder Value
Nov 18, 2025
Space for the Departed: Bone Ash Apartments as an Alternative to Cemeteries in Urban China
Nov 13, 2025
Space Selfie: Rethinking Scalarity Between Orbit and Home
Nov 06, 2025
Series Introduction: The Politics of Writing About Platform Workers’ Organizing
Nov 04, 2025
The Ones Who Walk Away from the Internet
Oct 31, 2025
Freud Among the Geneticists
Oct 29, 2025
Uterus Transplantation: A Scientific Advance or the Reflection of Gender Stereotypes?
Oct 27, 2025
When Queer Lovers Collaborate: The Rough Edges of Smooth Knowledge in a Diabetes Research Project
Oct 23, 2025
Behind the Monster: Reading Frankenstein as a Warning Against Isolation, Greed, and Hubris in 21st Century Agritech
Oct 21, 2025
Necrovitality and Porous Exclusions: On Dying amidst Chemical Vitalities
Oct 09, 2025
Dreaming of Security through Lanyards and Bollards
Oct 02, 2025
Reflections on a Feminist Anthropology or a Mutirão Anthropology: Karipuna Girls and Women
Sep 30, 2025
Digital Colonialism as “Progress”: What Will Convince You to Swap Your Guitar for an iPad?
Sep 25, 2025
A Feeling for Information: Technological Potentiality and Embodied Futures in Post-Socialist China
Sep 23, 2025
Collaborating Bodies: Community Gardens and Food Forests in Central Texas
Sep 11, 2025
Feeling Adrift in the Ethnography of a Laboratory
Sep 09, 2025
Can We Make Space for Technique?: Politics and Play in Digital Coaching
Sep 04, 2025
Odors, Leakage and Containment: The Story of a Southern California Landfill
Sep 02, 2025
For the Flourishing of Feminist Sciences: Distributing Seeds from the RAFeCT Network
Aug 28, 2025
The Politics of Translation Across Policy, Grant Proposal, and Agricultural Landscapes
Aug 26, 2025
Hawa-laat: Polluted Air in Delhi, India
Aug 07, 2025
Patch-“working” the Field: Methodological Reorientations During a Global Pandemic
Jul 29, 2025
Technics in the Dust
Jul 22, 2025
The Sovereignty of Wearables: Indigenous Health and Digital Colonialism in Taiwan
Jul 15, 2025
“I Just Want to Be Happy!”: Singing, Scrolling, and Healing in a Chinese Senior’s Digital Life
Jul 08, 2025
“Excavating” Cosmotechnical Diversity in Colombia and Sweden
Jul 03, 2025
Simulating Systemic Violence: Game Design as Speculative Ethnography in "Seven Days of Destruction"
Jul 01, 2025
Smart Wallets and the Shifting Boundaries of Trust in Decentralized Finance
Jun 26, 2025
Submarine Cyborgs: At Sea with Haraway and Jue
Jun 24, 2025
STS Academic Publishing As a Work of Service and Hope: A Conversation with Vivette García-Deister
Jun 19, 2025
Peasant Reserve Zones as Techno-socio-environmental Assemblages
Jun 12, 2025
Homecoming: Tasting Death in a Vietnamese Forensic Laboratory 
Jun 10, 2025
The Sugar Library
Jun 03, 2025
The Porosity of Promise: Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and the New Science of Technofixation
May 29, 2025
What if We’ve Been Thinking About Wildfire Smoke the Wrong Way?
May 20, 2025
The Ecosystem Multiple: Navigating the Transatlantic Fate of Biosphere 1 ½
May 08, 2025
“It's like... 'You’re welcome. Love, science'”: On Doing Critical Anthropology when the Enterprise is Under Attack
May 01, 2025
Laughter and Dreaming of Wins in Recovery
Apr 29, 2025
Toward a Linked Data Approach to Shifting Identities and NULL Values in Data Sets
Apr 17, 2025
Data Centers, Transnational Collaborations, and the Differing Meanings of Connection
Apr 15, 2025
From Bin to Bank: Recycling Household Waste in Urban Indonesia
Apr 10, 2025
Who Will Protect Andean Potatoes in the Near Future? Uncertainties About the Next Generation of Native Potato Conservationists
Apr 08, 2025
Bodies as Proxies, or The Stratigraphic Evidence of Our Appetites, at Metabolic Scales from the Human to the Planetary, on the Occasion of the Anthropocene’s Ongoing Debate About Itself
Apr 03, 2025
Witnessing the Porous World
Apr 01, 2025
Following Primates
Mar 25, 2025
The Limits of Identity: How Race and Gender Constructs in Biometric Technology Narrow Who We Are
Mar 18, 2025
Experimental Methodologies for Listening to the Present: An Interview with Alejandra Osejo-Varona
Mar 13, 2025
The Politics of Civic Education 
Mar 11, 2025
What are “Walking Simulators,” Ethnographically?
Mar 04, 2025
Responsible AI in Action: Beyond Policy Regimes
Feb 27, 2025
The Cyborg is Dead: The Node Rises
Feb 25, 2025
Major Internet Outages are Getting Bigger and Occurring More Often: A Reflection on the CrowdStrike IT Outage
Feb 18, 2025
Disruptions in Grace: Embracing Mutation and Disability in Nature through Art
Feb 06, 2025
Thinking with Epistemic Things: Quality and its Consequences in Agri-Commodities Markets
Jan 28, 2025
On Menstruation and Feeling Shame
Dec 19, 2024
Swimming Against the Current: Navigating Distrust in Open Science
Dec 17, 2024
Common(s) in Science and Technology? Dispatches from the SEEKCommons Network
Dec 17, 2024
“Work together, eat bread together”: Stardew Valley and the Dream of the Commons
Dec 03, 2024
Underneath It All: Unveiling the Toxic Reality of Fast Fashion Underwear and the Social Dimension of Health
Nov 28, 2024
Dining With Dogs: More-than-Human Relations in Food Media
Nov 26, 2024
Green Lady Cambodia: A Small Initiative for A Big Change on Menstrual Health and Hygiene Education
Nov 21, 2024
The Evolution of the Digital Divide: New Dimensions of Digital Inequality
Nov 19, 2024
Trade versus Academic Press: Part 2 of Publishing in Academia
Oct 22, 2024
How to Create Figurations and Inhabit Feminist STS Research: A DIY Manual
Oct 17, 2024
Do Academics Need Agents?: Part 1 of Publishing in Academia
Oct 15, 2024
Brush Strokes to Bytes: Anthropological Praxis in Business
Oct 08, 2024
Worrying over Speaking and the Pretentiousness of Podcasts
Oct 02, 2024
Chaotic Oscillation: Understanding the Paradoxical Presence of Video Games in Contemporary Society
Oct 01, 2024
Critical Metals, Magic Tricks, and Energy Transition: A Social Biography of Lithium
Sep 26, 2024
Geoengineering: De Facto Environmental Governance and Alternative Future Making
Sep 24, 2024
Space Anthropology with Savannah Mandel
Sep 04, 2024
From a Hashtag to the Right for Indoor Air Quality: A Short Story of the #covidisairborne Movement
Sep 03, 2024
Foucault, Dialectics, and Randomized Clinical Trials: Bridges Between Medicine and Anthropology
Aug 29, 2024
From Foraging to Keeping Bees in Northeast Brazil
Aug 27, 2024
Commodifying Disability as an Experience
Aug 20, 2024
Medicine Disoriented
Aug 15, 2024
The Cloud is Too Loud: Spotlighting the Voices of Community Activists from the Data Center Capital of the World
Aug 13, 2024
Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico
Aug 06, 2024
Questioning the Market: How Does the South Korean "Camming" (Beot-bang) Market Grow?
Aug 01, 2024
Trolling: Breaking Rules, Poking Fun, or Just Outright Harassment?
Jul 30, 2024
Digital Anthropology of the Senses: Connecting Technology and Culture Through the Sensory World
Jul 23, 2024
Cards and Codes: Spirituality and Magic in the (Bio)technological Era
Jul 11, 2024
The Many Modes of Ethnography
Jul 03, 2024
To Witness: Cell Phone Cameras, Immigrant Communities, and Police Accountability
Jul 02, 2024
Anthropology of a Dream: The Stakes of Studying Addiction in America
Jun 25, 2024
Between the Bitterness of Anonymity and Ethics is Racism: Reflections for Anthropological Research on Science in the 'Backyard'
Jun 20, 2024
On Disability, Infrastructure, and Shame
Jun 18, 2024
What Will Be Lost: A Cat, a Man with a Horse, and the Battle at Court
Jun 13, 2024
Being Heard as Experimental
Jun 11, 2024
The “Doing” of Collaborative Ethnography
Jun 06, 2024
Premediations of Carcerality: Notes on Targeted Surveillance in Postcolonial India
Jun 04, 2024
On Observing: Reflections on UN Climate Policy Negotiations from Paris to the Present
May 30, 2024
Cultures of Trust in Computing and Beyond
May 28, 2024
Gazing into the Eyes of Elephants: Unsettling Recognition in Multispecies Relations
May 23, 2024
Waves of Well-being: Surfing at the Shaka Surf Club in Kodi Bengre, India
May 21, 2024
“We had to rethink many, many things”: Reflexivity in Scientific Practices during the Zika Epidemic in Recife, Brazil
Apr 25, 2024
Tear Gas as Punishment
Apr 18, 2024
Spatial Approaches to Livestreaming: A Methodological Exploration in Digital Ethnography
Apr 16, 2024
Two Insomniacs Discuss Routine and Restlessness Through Google Tracking
Apr 04, 2024
Recipes of Resistance: Global Digital Gastro-solidarity for Palestine
Mar 26, 2024
Bed-Time Storytelling
Mar 12, 2024
Who Knows About Ethical Research?: Reflections on Research Ethics and Vulnerability in Abortion Research
Mar 05, 2024
Anthropology, STS, and the Politics of Imagination in Navigating Socio-Environmental Change
Feb 27, 2024
Lonely Planet Looking for Connection: Citizen Science SETI Research at NASA
Feb 20, 2024
Water Scarcity, Hydropolitics, and the Importance of Materiality at the Foothills of the Rocky Mountains
Jan 30, 2024
Milei, Crowds, and Concrete Waves in Argentina
Dec 21, 2023
Platypod, Episode Eight: CASPR 2023
Dec 12, 2023
Algorithmic Imaginations in Agriculture: Automation?
Nov 28, 2023
High Costs, Entangled Politics: What All Comes Inside a Medication’s Packaging
Nov 21, 2023
Belly Versus Bin: How Digital Autoethnography Brought Me Back From the Brink of Disordered Eating
Nov 14, 2023
On Algorithmic Divination
Oct 31, 2023
Plastic Chronicles: Navigating Mumbai’s Material Mazes
Oct 24, 2023
Funeral for an Embryo
Oct 17, 2023
How to Imagine the Unknown: Choosing an Arm Prosthesis
Oct 12, 2023
Staring Contest
Oct 10, 2023
The Wild Pantry
Oct 03, 2023
"The Day I Discovered I Was Collaborating on a Eugenics Project": On Imponderables in Collaborative Research
Sep 26, 2023
Making Companion Species at a Robotics Lab
Sep 21, 2023
"Blooming Biomes Mean Blooming Profits": 'Nature-based' Industrial Farming and the Politics of the Industrial Animal Microbiome
Sep 12, 2023
AI as a Feminist Issue
Sep 05, 2023
Female Truck Drivers in China Navigate Gender Norms on Douyin
Aug 22, 2023
Between Pain and Relief: Morphine's Ambiguities in India
Aug 17, 2023
Madam Cistern
Aug 15, 2023
Fake, Real, Real, Fake: Salvarsan on the US Medical Market
Aug 08, 2023
Hippocrates Against Protocols: Experiments, Experience, and Evidence-Based Medicine in Brazil
Jul 25, 2023
AI, Climate Adaptation, and Epistemic Injustice
Jul 20, 2023
Tokens, Voids, and Archives: Locating Berlin's NFT Projects
Jul 18, 2023
Ways of Knowing: Lessons on Agroecological Transitions from a Pothwari Farm
Jul 11, 2023
A Vocabulary for Junk in Four Movements
Jul 06, 2023
Junk Anthropology: A Manifesto for Trashing and Untrashing
Jul 04, 2023
Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Entropy: Internet and Synthetic Biology Pioneer Randy Rettberg’s Story on How Information Was Forged
Jun 27, 2023
Making Bioethnographic Teams Work: Disciplinary Destabilization, Generative Friction, and the Role of Mediators
Jun 22, 2023
How Microbes Became Friendly: Visualizations of the Microbiome in Public Media
Jun 15, 2023
Platypod, Episode Seven: An Anthropology of Data, AI, and Much More
Jun 13, 2023
Setting Traps: For an Insurgent and Joyful Science
May 25, 2023
"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?": Food, Cooking, and Eating in Video Games
May 09, 2023
Violence/Freedom: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance in Public Parks
May 02, 2023
Birding in Ruins: Multispecies Encounters and the Ecologies of Evidence
Apr 25, 2023
The Perfect Fit
Apr 18, 2023
The Illness Experience of a Forty-year-old Hispanic Woman
Apr 13, 2023
The Use of Patent Information to Investigate Algorithmic Systems
Apr 11, 2023
Platypod, Episode Six: An Anthropology of Algorithmic Recommendation Systems
Apr 06, 2023
Making Forecasts Work: The Evolution of Seasonal Forecasting by Funceme in Ceará, Northeast Brazil
Apr 04, 2023
Digital Multiples and Social Media
Mar 28, 2023
Transpositioning, a Hypertext-ethnography
Mar 21, 2023
Dining with the Diaspora: Khmerican Digital Gastrodiplomacy
Mar 07, 2023
Grafting with Care: Encountering Human-Plant Relations Through Experiments with Roses
Feb 14, 2023
Little Experiments in Worldmaking with Amor Mundi Lab
Dec 08, 2022
Uncovering Ethnography in Creative Practice Research with Machines
Dec 06, 2022
You Are What You Grow: Crops, Cultivation, and Caste in India
Nov 15, 2022
Toxicity, Violence, and the Legacies of Mercury and Gold Mining in Colombia
Nov 09, 2022
Platypod, Episode Five: CASPR - CASTAC in the Spring 2022
Nov 03, 2022
Platypod, Episode Four: Connections and Disconnections on Social Media
Oct 27, 2022
Embracing Black Positionalities, (Re)Centring Slowness: A Challenge to Anthropology’s Anti-Racism Efforts
Oct 18, 2022
Injury and Fitness: Responsibility through Biomedicine 
Oct 04, 2022
Platypod, Episode Three: Disability, Toxicity, and the Environment
Sep 27, 2022
All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa: Building Colonies without Colonization
Sep 13, 2022
Photoshopping Desire: Gender, Caste, and the "Authentic" Self
Sep 06, 2022
Interactive Science Museums: Replicating Science Without a Context
Aug 25, 2022
PrEP on Trial: the Future of HIV in Indonesian Policy Worlds
Aug 23, 2022
Platypod, Episode Two: Ableism in Anthropology and Higher Ed
Aug 09, 2022
Counting on Montane Birds: Biologists, Verticality, and Territorial Defense in Colombia
Aug 02, 2022
Platypod, Episode One: Technologies and Politics of Accessibility
Jul 26, 2022
(Mis)Managing Algorithms of Hate: The Nexus of Big Tech and the State in India
Jul 19, 2022
The Allowable Limit of Disability
Jun 22, 2022
Detangling Molecular Hauntings: Hair as a Site of Preserving Lived Experience
Jun 14, 2022
Inclusion and Opportunities for Equal Participation for Autistic University Students in France
Jun 07, 2022
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Epistemologies – The Line Between Bodies and Ideas?
May 31, 2022
Technologies of Equal Participation: Formats, Designs, Practices. Introduction.
May 17, 2022
Viral Entanglements in Malaysian Porcine Worlds
May 12, 2022
Thinking in Constellations: Problematizing Indigeneity in the Atacama Desert, Chile
May 10, 2022
Revisiting Human-Machine Relationships and Efforts of Feminist STS
May 03, 2022
Alliances and Institutional Partnerships for an Engaged Anthropology of Science and Technology
Apr 26, 2022
Disability Dongle
Apr 19, 2022
Powerpoint Karaoke, a Ph.D. Version
Apr 14, 2022
People Are Not Fixed Media
Apr 12, 2022
Climatic Futures and Tree Response-ability: Can Urban Forests Restore Human-Tree Relations?
Apr 05, 2022
​​Traveling but Not Arriving: Hieroglyphics of Caste in Computing
Mar 29, 2022
Netlicks and Chill: Digitalization and Food Politics in Taste the TV (TTTV) Technology
Mar 15, 2022
Ethnographies of Nuclear Life: From Victimhood to Post-Victimization
Mar 01, 2022
From Amusement to Conscientization: The Purpose of Media Literacy in the Age of Misinformation
Feb 15, 2022
Queered Ruptures: The Politics of Anti-irradiation Maternalism in the TEPCO Nuclear Disaster, Kokutai, and Hentai
Feb 10, 2022
Reactions and Ruptures: Ethnographies of Nuclear Life
Feb 01, 2022
Platypus in 2022
Jan 25, 2022
A Very Lengthy Swedish Introduction: Hype, Storytelling, and the Question of Entrepreneurial Allies
Aug 03, 2021