This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Valeria Sánchez-Prieto can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/animals-in-war-multispecies-agency-and-the-memory-of-the-colombian-armed-conflict/. About the post: In one testimony from Colombia’s armed conflict, a parrot named Lola repeated the phrases she heard around her: “Paraco asesino” (“paramilitary murderer”), “Viva la guerrilla” (“long live the guerrilla”), and “The vultures are coming” Her voice condensed the sounds, fears, and political tensions of war into a multispecies archive of memory. Far from being passive witnesses, animals moved within the infrastructures of conflict as companions, alarms, transportation, and sometimes even weapons. Yet these violent incorporations are only the most extreme expression of a broader multispecies world of conflict. (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 Christina Kefala can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/making-for-the-feed-creativity-platforms-and-visibility-in-china/. About the post: In China, creative production is immediately embedded within circuits of monetization and visibility. Content can move seamlessly from aesthetic expression to commercial transaction, collapsing distinctions between artist, influencer, and entrepreneur.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mauricio Baez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/what-would-happen-if-ethnographers-learned-to-process-signals/. About the post: In this piece, I use software typically employed for sound synthesis and real-time audiovisual composition, which allows sounds to be created and shaped digitally, often in connection with visual elements. In this particular case, I composed the music using synthesis, together with an audio-reactive visual system, in which the images change in response to the sound’s rhythm, frequency, or intensity.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Awa Diagne can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/blood-circulation-opening-up-a-closed-system/. About the post: But, blood has never been a single, unified fluid. Among blood’s several components—red blood cells, plasma, platelets—not all have the same exact velocity. When I began developing my dissertation project, which seeks to ethnographically follow blood across myriad institutions, locales and historical periods, I started to observe different models that helped me visualize blood circulation. For me, the question is thus not only how does blood work, but also how is it seen? And how can we better see it?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Faridah Laffan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/whats-in-a-name/. About the post: In 1870, Samuel Birch, respected Egyptologist at the British Museum, wished to form a society aimed at understanding the ancient near eastern world through its cuneiform and hieroglyphic texts. Similar organizations had existed, but none that lasted and certainly none that carried out the kind of rigorous geographical, archaeological, and philological work that Birch trusted. How could he create an organization centered around detailed intellectual research while holding the moneyed attention necessary to publish it? Specialist societies proliferated throughout the century, but whether they survived was down to numerous factors, not least of which were membership size and wealth. In the end, Birch leaned on the theological implications of his interests to devise a name for his organization calculated to attract the membership he needed: the Society of Biblical Archaeology was born. (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 Adam Matthew Mikhail can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/what-the-map-conceals-sovereignty-and-the-sea-in-the-strait-of-gibraltar/. About the post: Sovereignty at sea does not work the way maps suggest. The Strait of Gibraltar is not a line, it is a volume with depth, surface, and air. Its currents run in opposite directions, seasonal winds close it to small vessels for months, and fish migrations predate any legal framework by millennia. Governing this space means governing something that territorial thinking, built on the premise of fixed, bounded, and mappable surfaces, was never designed to handle. (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 Ritu Ghosh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/criminality-risk-and-labor-altruistic-surrogacy-in-contemporary-india/. About the post: By criminalizing surrogate workers’ right to economic compensation for their biomedically intensive, risky, intimate labor, the state refuses to recognize them as workers, pushing them into further precarity. In allowing surrogacy to only be “altruistic” in the name of “exploitation,” the state turns a blind eye to surrogate workers’ material and structural conditions, facilitating the growth of an underground market in commercial surrogacy that puts workers at greater risk instead.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Melissa Villa Nicholas can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/data-borders-three-years-later/. About the post: People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (2023 UC Press), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Isha Bhallamudi, Anushree Gupta and Eesha Kunduri can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/gender-dimensions-of-platform-work-how-do-they-shape-unionizing/. About the post: The promise of flexibility has been a prime reason that attracted women workers to platforms like UC, as it enables them to access paid work while also attending to their housework and care work responsibilities. It is this very erosion of flexibility that women were holding UC to account for.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Alena Thiel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/techno-ethics-and-feminist-ai-what-role-for-an-african-studies-approach-to-science-and-technology/. About the post: As Francis Nyamnjoh reminds us, both “[b]odies and forms are never complete; they are open-ended malleable vessels to be appropriated by consciousness in its multiplicity. Bodies provide for hearts and minds to intermingle, accommodating the dreams and hopes of both, and mitigating the propensity of the one to outrace the other” (Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 257). This Platypus blog series explores how incompleteness provides an ethical stance by foregrounding interlinkages, connections and relations over the totalizing vision of African AI developments.