Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Karina Aranda can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/11/there-is-a-ghost-in-the-box-insightful-surprises-from-a-note-taking-archive/. About the post: In research processes, unexpected moments can prove immensely insightful. In this text, the author explores surprise, error, and disagreements to challenge the representation of note-taking archives as Second Brains for productivity. She distances herself from the efficiency-oriented approach that promotes technology-enhanced memory, framing note-taking archives —through the lens of slow and crip time—as fragile modes of existence and knowledge. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nathan Kim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/back-to-class-designing-for-with-and-through-the-class-struggle/. About the post: The varied forms of violence and repression to quell unrest today also compel us to pursue a range of tactics; we must constantly maneuver to survive and win. We therefore should refuse any absolute commitment to any single method (workshops, interviews, ethnographies), and instead reorient the entirety of design towards engagement with the class struggle.

So too do we seek to reorient the central aims of HCI as a disciplinary field with design theories. Rather than view a theorization of class struggle as one of many possible theories for better scholarship or products, we seek instead to understand the many possible theories of scholarship each as one possible component of a shared struggle. Long live the class struggle!

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Amanda Domingues can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/does-everything-belong-back-home-rethinking-repatriation-in-the-brazilian-context/. About the post: In Brazil, as across much of global archaeology, repatriation is recognized as the main consensus among professionals and communities working with ancient material culture. Alternative approaches exist but receive minimal attention because they challenge dominant disciplinary paradigms focused on rectifying colonial histories. This essay examines two such approaches, revealing tensions between preservation, institutional precarity, and historical responsibility, and raising questions about what "care" means when institutional capacity is unevenly distributed. Applying a supposed consensus without close attention to local realities obscures viable alternatives and reproduces knowledge hierarchies—both internationally and within national borders—that continue to marginalize Indigenous perspectives and local expertise. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rong Mu can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/unfinished-bodies-cosmetic-surgeries-among-aging-sex-workers-in-singapore/. About the post: When I met Mia in her massage parlour, she had recently undergone cosmetic surgery. She openly showed me the sutures, dense and deep, tracing almost her entire hairline. Two weeks earlier, she had travelled to Shanghai for a major facelift involving the lifting and tightening of the skin.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by David Antolínez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/a-one-trick-pony-among-poly-metis-at-the-16th-esocite-congress/. About the post: From the beginning I felt the hospitality of the professors of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, despite them being busy with final arrangements. Too aware of my peripheral role in this community, I decided to stay at the margin and pay close attention to others. A feminist ethnographer working with textiles gave the inaugural lecture. She started by confessing her ambivalent feelings about the usefulness of these international meetings. She next remembered one of the first congresses of the Latin American network, where John Law eagerly spoke about non-human agency. Despite the lack of remuneration and the inevitable waste (printed materials, disposable coffee cups, megabytes of stored files in the cloud, etc.), the committee accepted the challenge of hosting the 16th Congress of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE).

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Maria Isabel Trivilin can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/broilers-that-cant-even-fend-for-themselves-mother-hens-and-production-infrastructures/. About the post: In this post, Maria Isabel Trivilin immerses readers in southern Brazil's industrial broiler production. Through close-up ethnographic observation, she explores the web of relationships that emerges within confinement spaces, where broilers, unlike free-range chickens, can’t even fend for themselves. The agribusiness assemblage shaping their lives before they become food is woven from industrial, economic, political, and ethical interests, microbial science, and human care. Ultimately, Trivilin compels us to ask: Who is caring for whom — and who suffers from care’s violence — in a setting where death is the inevitable outcome? (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Marie Comuzzo can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/listening-with-whales-song-grief-and-obligation-across-ways-of-knowing/. About the post: Who do we listen with and who do we recognize as meaningful producers of culture? Listening with Whales is a digital commons that brings scientific, artistic, musical, ancestral, poetic, trans, queer, decolonial, Black, Indigenous, and embodied forms of listening into conversation to reshape the ways we relate with one another within the worlds we share.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Huntington can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/my-unemployment-in-the-time-of-ai/. About the post: AI has widened the liminal space of unemployment, and the “limitless” capability of AI job-seeking tools has also exploded. This all felt like putting out a fire with a bucket of fire—and finding my way out required a very different kind of network.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiffany Prendergast can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/softmaxxing-skepticism-how-looksmaxxing-culture-recruits-the-mainstream/. About the post: Because institutional medicine offers no real answer to aesthetic anxiety, the underground is able to fill the gap using rhetoric anti-vaccine influencers have already normalized. Peptide vendors and biohacking gurus borrow directly from that playbook: "Big pharma doesn't want you to know," "your doctor is behind the times," and "take health into your own hands." Anti-establishment framing isn't an accident here; it's baked into the pitch because the premise is that official channels already failed you.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Luisa Madrigal Marroquín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/imagined-geographies-from-urban-expertise-to-rural-health-intervention/. About the post: This post looks at how health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. The author argues that they also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Juan Camilo Ospina Deaza can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyond-deficit-toward-a-strengths-based-approach-to-male-infertility/. About the post: Concerns about declining sperm quality and male reproductive capacity have become increasingly prominent in scientific, clinical, and public discussions of fertility. Yet infertility has historically been located within women’s bodies and treated primarily as a women’s problem, placing women under disproportionate reproductive responsibility, scrutiny, blame, and clinical intervention. This framing has also contributed to men’s reproductive bodies and experiences receiving comparatively limited attention. Growing concern about male reproductive capacity has been accompanied by increasing attention to how male fertility might be preserved, improved, and optimised, alongside broader demographic narratives that frame declining reproductive capacity as a potential threat to future populations. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lucy Pei can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/transnational-solidarity-exploring-alternate-global-imaginaries-of-work/. About the post: What is the significance of gig worker activists’ claim on the global scale in relation to reclaiming the futures of work? Following Anna Tsing, I consider scale to be “not just a neutral frame for viewing the world” but instead as something that “must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects,” (Tsing, 2005, p. 58). The sample book cover image and slogans are examples of how activists self-consciously claimed the global scale. A gig worker’s complaints can be viewed as a personal-scale problem to be solved by finding a new job or getting reinstated. A union can assert itself as focused on the scale of the factory, the company, the city, or the nation. A social movement can style itself as being local or it can argue that the issues it addresses are global in scale. In addition

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Catherina Wilson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/smart-methods-whatsapp-ethics-and-inclusive-knowledge-production/. About the post: Digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have offered methodological opportunities for connection, data collection, and the democratization of knowledge production, in part because they are easily accessible and affordable. The advantages notwithstanding, we must critically reflect on the limitations and ethical implications of these digital platforms. Because WhatsApp is integrated into the lives of our research participants, it proved to be a useful tool during our own collaborative analysis and writing process too.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Fatima Tariq can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/time-virtuality-and-the-digital-sacred/. About the post: The above scene from Ramy (Season 2, Episode 7) depicts an absurd yet moving moment featuring characters Mo and Ahmed performing umrah through VR headsets. As Mo embraces the virtual Ka’aba, he tearfully breaks down; we see a performance of embodied devotion through his digitally mediated umrah experience. While VR pilgrimages remain niche and laughable to many, their use by some travel agencies and religious groups to practice for actual pilgrimage highlights how digital technologies are reshaping sacred journeys. This project attempts to interrogate how digital mediation transforms spatiotemporal logics of religious practice particularly through the lens of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981, Agha 2007), the co-constituion of time and space in narrative and interaction. Linguistic anthropology’s concept of chronotope may help us unpack this tension.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ambar Reyes can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyond-delivering-food-networks-risk-and-the-hidden-infrastructure-of-gig-work/. About the post: Delivery workers do not merely use communication platforms; they inhabit and transform them into sociotechnical infrastructures of collective life. Through these arrangements, knowledge, social relations, moral authority, and identity are actively produced and maintained. In tracing the circulation of information, responsibility, and care across urban and transnational space, this blogpost reveals how systems designed for labor extraction are repurposed as infrastructures of care, accountability, and collective knowledge across neighbourhoods and national borders. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Emmanuel Anguiano-Hernández can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/strategies-and-tools-for-knowledge-generation-in-art-science/. About the post: To what extent do measurements from an electroencephalography headset provide evidence of the aesthetic contemplation state of the person wearing it?
(This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aldo Federico Palafox Hernández can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/kilitl-living-with-a-green-part-of-the-world-edible-greens-language-knowledge-and-territory/. About the post: In Mexico, quelites refers to uncultivated edible plants. The word has a Nahuatl origin derived from kilitl, a term referring to these edible weeds. The earliest dictionaries of colonial Mexico translated kilitl as “vegetable”, an equivalence that obscured the fact that they were collected (not cultivated), and interpreted them as any other green crop. There is an ongoing trend to revaluate quelites as a way to counter their gradual disappearance from national diets. These efforts involve universities, governmental and private institutions, civil associations, and organized communities. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lucy Pei, Joy Ming, Kim Fernandes and Rosemary Steup can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/reclaiming-the-future-of-work-series-introduction/. About the post: Global South, global majority, and decolonial lenses help us to break out of dominant points of view. Taking on a range of methods, the empirical and conceptual works draw lessons from workers’ embodied experiences and relationships to one another and to the places they work, from discourse and discursive objects, and from speculative engagements.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Al Lim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/venture-capitals-due-diligence-or-ethnographys-adversarial-twin/. About the post: Anthropologists have long framed studying up as a problem of access: how to get inside institutions that do not want us (Nader 1972; Souleles 2018). My problem was different. Having spent time doing both ethnographic fieldwork and leading several venture investments, my problem was less about access than about processing the continuities and frictions between these two roles.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sridhar Raghavan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/silt-sea-and-coastal-engineering/. About the post: In 1870, the Vedaranyam canal is built connecting the Salt Pans nearby Palk bay coasts 5 to Nagapattinam – serving twin purposes of cheap transport of salt to Nagapattinam for trade, as well as deepening the river channels slightly upstream of the Port. A permanent wharf was constructed from some of the dredged sand in the 1870s. But dredging was repeatedly claimed as costly. Equally, the cyclone of 1862 damaged the extended river mouth groynes, and the British were able to repair them only by 1865. In 1909, experimental groynes erected at a distance from the river mouth were destroyed and washed away further south during the North East monsoon – which the Port Officer describes as “It will be seen by the above that these exposed groynes cannot withstand the fury of the northeast monsoon, and any expenditure on this account will be a waste of money”. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)