This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/is-edtechs-stuckness-a-kind-of-fixation/. About the post: In this third addition to our series on stuckness, Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry suggest that the question of what emerges in the wake of getting stuck can also be a generative opening for scholarly reflexivity. In this piece on recent controversies around the use of AI assistants in classrooms in the United Kingdom, the authors situate this recent debate within a longer history in which new technology has repeatedly promised to revolutionize education and failed to materialize that claim. The current moment is not the first time when claims of technologically driven progress got stuck. By dwelling on this muddy history rather than focusing solely on the latest technology and its limits, Oliver and Henry offer a novel reading of the contemporary controversy around AI. This case highlights how stuckness can be a resource for scholars hoping to understand the enduring appeals and pitfall

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Victor Secco can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/searching-for-microbes-with-no-name-the-labour-of-sampling-and-the-making-of-scientific-value/. About the post: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with microbiome scientists on a sampling expedition along Europe's coastlines, this post follows the manual, embodied labour that turns soil, water, sand, and air into biological data. It argues that the value circulating in bioinformatics is created earlier, by hand, in the field—through the muddy, unglamorous work of collecting, labelling, and barcoding samples—even as that labour tends to disappear once samples are digitalized. It asks what counts as scientific work, where it happens, and who gets the credit for it.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Seon Shim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/collaborating-with-precarity-anthropology-on-crip-time/. About the post: Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short‑term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish threaten sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, raising a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within such a precarious, short‑term, and unequal academic landscape? This post explores disability anthropology and crip time as ways of inhabiting this contradiction differently, centering disabled temporalities, Indigenous frameworks, and collaborative, action‑oriented projects as methods for reassembling the discipline’s colonial legacies toward more livable futures. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

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. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/platypod-episode-twelve-hacking-alternative-futures/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tania Cristina Pérez-Bustos and Ana María Ulloa-Garzón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/why-study-smell-in-clothes/. About the post: The question that begins this text guides an investigation that brings together two fields that are marginal to the social studies of knowledge, materiality, and technology: olfactory studies and textile studies. At that intersection, we seek to ethnographically investigate a minor gesture: smelling the clothes of someone who is no longer there, within an everyday and domestic context. (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 Şafak Kılıçtepe and Emine Onculer Yayalar can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/between-cure-and-care-governing-bodies-in-turkiyes-hybrid-medical-landscape/. About the post: What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. (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 Vageesh Vishnoi can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/delivering-in-delhi-ethnographic-reflections-on-working-with-the-food-delivery-platform/. About the post: This ethnographic reflection emerges from participant observation as a food-delivery rider in Delhi and examines how platform workers navigate the spatiotemporal realities of gig work. While existing scholarship has extensively analysed algorithmic management, this account foregrounds workers’ lived experiences of mobility, rest, and ephemerality. Drawing on fieldwork at delivery hotspots, it shows how workers transform platform infrastructures into spaces of sociability, mutual aid, and occasional resistance. The paper further explores the ephemeral nature of platform labour, where constantly changing incentive structures erode workers’ ability to stabilise expectations and contest deteriorating conditions. Together, these dynamics reveal the everyday politics of algorithmic capitalism and workers’ efforts to negotiate its contradictions.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes and Mandy Penney can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/becoming-with-mushrooms-multispecies-collective-autoethnography-for-reworlding-educational-environments/. About the post: Engaging with mushrooms as conceptual companions allowed us to explore the complex multiplicity of ways of knowing, living, being, and valuing that are entangled in world-building (van Dooren et. al., 2016). The mushroom, and more specifically, the entangled network of root structures below the visible fruiting body (known as the mycelial network), were “an embodied entry point” (Kapp, 2025) for reflection on how the structures, systems, and behaviors of mycelial networks could allow us to rethink and reshape knowledge sharing, perceptions of time, and constructions of self and knowledge in academia.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Neiman and Erin Coleman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/noclipping-into-the-contemporary-anthropology-in-the-backrooms/. About the post: Other franchises may inspire or invite fan art, fan theories, and fan fiction. But for Backrooms, this kind of participation is not incidental to the product; it is constitutive of it. Even for anthros who normally have no truck with narrative film in general, or who assiduously avoid horror in particular, we argue that the Backrooms phenomenon's remarkable resonance with young audiences, its unique origin story, and its productive blurring of the online, fictional, and physical worlds merits consideration for scholars of media, communication, and the present moment in general. Rarely in recent memory has blockbuster US cinema felt so tapped in to what it feels like to be alive right now,  make it excellent fodder for what Paul Rabinow (2007) identified as the field’s ability to develop an “anthropology of the contemporary."

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Prerna Gupta can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/a-progress-without-people-six-decades-of-living-next-to-indias-first-nuclear-power-plant/. About the post: When officials from the Department of Atomic Energy first arrived to survey this coastline, the villagers had welcomed them with open arms. Jitendra Raul's father, then the sarpanch (village head) of Delwadi, sheltered the visiting scientists when their tents blew away. In the atmosphere of India’s movement for independence, the villagers had greeted the nuclear reactor with pride, willingly giving up their lands for the nation's progress. However, for the past six decades, they have struggled to make their claim on it.