This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Emma Jahoda-Brown can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/odors-leakage-and-containment-the-story-of-a-southern-california-landfill/. About the post: My interest in Chiquita Canyon and the community of Val Verde grew out of my involvement with the community opposition to the landfill expansion in 2017. Now, as an anthropology student, my focus has shifted to how the sensory experience of Chiquita Canyon is interpreted, classified, regulated and elusive to regulatory agencies, community members and landfill operators and how these experiences come into conflict. Community members can use odor complaints filed through regulatory agencies to argue the case that the landfill is causing harm. These odor complaints, however, are highly contested by landfill operators as it is difficult to prove that odors are coming from the landfill as opposed to another source.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Clarissa Reche can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/08/for-the-flourishing-of-feminist-sciences-distributing-seeds-from-the-rafect-network/. About the post: In a political and scientific landscape that is becoming ever more arid, tense, and hostile to the struggles for transformation and social justice, it is with great joy and enthusiasm that we present this series of four posts written by Brazilian feminist anthropologists and intended for academic readers specializing in STS, as well as for readers in broader feminist networks and activist/grassroots 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 Cydney Seigerman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/08/the-politics-of-translation-across-policy-grant-proposal-and-agricultural-landscapes/. About the post: In June, we submitted a modified scope and budget to align with new requirements and policy priorities while striving to maintain the overall objective: to support producers to expand sustainable agricultural practices and access to related markets. We are still waiting for the USDA’s decision on what I call Project A version 2.0. In this post, I examine the dynamics of transdisciplinary agricultural research in the context of recent, stark changes in political priorities. I consider the mobilization of the term “underserved producers” to shape research objectives and activities through processes of translation from government policy priorities to grant proposals and participant-recruitment efforts.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Vasundhara Bhojvaid can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/08/hawa-laat-polluted-air-in-delhi-india/. About the post: Experts ascertain that air pollution is a regional phenomenon engulfing the Indo-Gangetic Plain that encompasses northern and eastern India (including Delhi), eastern Pakistan, southern Nepal, and almost all of Bangladesh (Hameed et al. 2000; Ramanathan and Raman 2005). This regional assessment too requires the mediation of human-made science that seeks to quantify the effects of materials in the air inhaled by breathing bodies. However, in popular discourse the air pollution problem in the Indo-Gangetic Plain remains a largely urban issue. My intent then is to interrogate how Delhi became a hawaalat since 2014, a city that seemingly encloses air in popular imagination, and not lose sight of the slippery and ephemeral planetary circulations of air. (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 Anushree Gupta can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/patch-working-the-field-methodological-reorientations-during-a-global-pandemic/. About the post: My research has been a culmination of witnessing, participating, and archiving otherwise invisible acts of care, hopeful experimentation, and provisional collaboration that enabled urban survival in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paying attention to provisional and patchworked modes of response, and offering a partial yet grounded view, created a critical vantage point to examine the evolution of digital platformisation through different phases of the pandemic and beyond. Auto-ethnographic curiosities about the normalization of digital platforms for accessing necessities during the pandemic led me to ask what exactly was being platformised.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Spencer Kaplan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/technics-in-the-dust/. About the post: Each year, thousands of Bay-Area tech workers attend Burning Man: an annual art festival in the Nevada desert. In this article, an ethnographer of AI development joins his interlocutors at the event and reflects on its resonances with the AI industry he studies. He argues that Burning Man’s unique environment and otherworldly experiences can help us think about the AI industry’s aspirations for civilizational transformation.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Su can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/the-sovereignty-of-wearables-indigenous-health-and-digital-colonialism-in-taiwan/. About the post: While the language of an easy technological “solution” certainly cannot undo the history of Indigenous injustice in Taiwan, it is important to remember that new technologies always also bring with them novel ways of imagining material relationships—of ownership, use, and control. To stay with such possibilities would entail not just denouncing health wearables altogether or aspiring toward a technology-free past, but would allow us to locate different ways that the trajectory of wearables might be changed to emphasize new relations of governance and self-determination.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Hui Wen can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/i-just-want-to-be-happy-singing-scrolling-and-healing-in-a-chinese-seniors-digital-life/. About the post: Like many older adults in China, Auntie Zhang has found her own way into the digital world. Her fascination with short videos is not about escaping reality, but her way of engaging with reality and making sense of it. When she scrolls, sings along, and lip-syncs, she holds onto her core values that life has often shaken but not erased. The sentimental ballads drifting through these online videos give shape to frustrations and bafflement that rarely find words. Although dismissed by outsiders as shallow or “tacky,” these short clips offer their creators something that lingers beyond fleeting internet trends: a way to reconcile with the past, to momentarily soften its sharp edges, and to craft a version of life that feels both bearable and expressive. (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 Eric Orlowski and Juan Forero-Duarte can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/excavating-cosmotechnical-diversity-in-colombia-and-sweden/. About the post: "Excavating" Cosmotechnical Diversity in Colombia and Sweden offers an ethnographic comparative study of metaphorical Silicon Valley's within local contexts of Sweden and Columbia using Yuk Hui's (2017) cosmotechnics as a conceptual framework.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/07/simulating-systemic-violence-game-design-as-speculative-ethnography-in-seven-days-of-destruction/. About the post: “Seven Days of Destruction” is a speculative game that confronts the structural logics of gun violence in the U.S.—poverty, miseducation, addiction—not through realism but through allegory and constraint. Set in a surreal environment of surveillance and coercion, players navigate ethical compromise and systemic complicity. Designed in the wake of campus shootings, the game merges procedural rhetoric with speculative ethnography, asking: what if the unplayable conditions of real life could be felt, not just represented? This post reflects on game design as method and politics, where playing the system becomes a mode of critique.