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.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nga Shi Yeu and Nga Shi Yeu can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/viral-afterlives-toponymy-of-zoonotic-ruptures-in-west-malaysia/. About the post: This post examines the enduring social and material fallout of the 1999 Nipah virus outbreak in West Malaysia. Moving beyond bureaucratic public health frameworks, it looks at how a Chinese-majority pig-farming community navigates toponymic stigma and the debris of catastrophe. Through a lens of childhood retrospect, it traces the intimate violence of mass culls, marked by persistent sensory and acoustic hauntings within a severed human-porcine ecosystem. In response to recurring disruptions such as COVID-19 and African Swine Fever, villagers mobilize these historic ruins into an ordinary ethic of care and collective resilience. This heritagization, manifested through backyard husbandry and the creation of a grassroots viral museum, reclaims a marginalized history to negotiate state neglect and racialized biosecurity governance. (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 Leonardo Thibau can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/brazilian-manosphere/. About the post: This post maps the early formation of Brazilian masculinism through a multimodal critical cartography of “Canal do Búfalo,” a prominent online manosphere forum active in the early 2010s. Drawing on a scraped corpus of 20,189 posts by 2,900 authors, it examines how users geographically self-identified and mobilized toponymic aliases to frame belonging, resentment, and masculinist truth-making online. By combining digital methods, critical cartography, and debates on symbolic interactionism, the study discusses how this forum helped shape a masculinist worldview organized around adversity and opposition to feminism. The maps reveal a strong concentration of activity in Brazil’s South and Southeast, while also highlighting regional variations in how users narratively framed their relation to territory. (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 Aylar Abdolahzadeh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/tracing-the-legacy-of-human-resilience-in-the-debris-of-ancient-campfires/. About the post: Have you ever made fire from scratch, without matches or charcoal? In the summer of 2015, I tried to recreate fire using flint, pyrite, and tinder. It quickly became clear that making fire is a learned skill that requires patience, observation, and practice but igniting fire was only the beginning because keeping that fire alive took even more effort. As an archaeologist, this experience led me to ask how our ancestors used, made, and maintained fire as a skill or catalyst. I began collecting, analyzing, and experimentally studying ancient fire traces, such as heat-altered stone tools, from sites across Europe and Southwest Asia. What I found was unexpected: despite the remarkable adaptability of our ancestors across time and space, fire use was far less consistent than I had assumed. Instead, it varied depending on where people lived and what their environments offered in terms of clima (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 Alejandro Cerón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/outbreak-mitigation-at-the-crossroads-technical-expertise-political-imperatives-and-the-myth-of-john-snow/. About the post: This essay analyzes the role of myth and narrative to analyze the tension between technical expertise and political imperatives in the work of mitigating outbreaks. The author draws upon ethnographic fieldwork with Guatemalan epidemiologists and their reflections on John Snow's intervention on cholera to show how this tension can be understood through the use of myth and narrative in society. (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 Cristian Gustavo Gutiérrez Pinzón can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/is-this-the-end-of-disability-eugenics-and-the-technification-of-normalization/. About the post: New reproductive and bodily intervention biotechnologies not only promise to cure or prevent diseases, but are also shaping a new regime of bodily normalization that redefines which lives are desirable, correctable, or eliminable. For several years, countries such as Iceland have stood out for medical procedures that identify the conditions under which a fetus is developing and then ask parents whether they wish to continue or terminate the pregnancy. Between 80–85% of pregnant women in Iceland undergo prenatal screening and, when the result is positive for trisomy 21, termination rates approach 100%...Geneticist Kari Stefansson, founder of deCODE Genetics, stated: “My understanding is, basically, that we have almost eradicated Down syndrome from our society; there will hardly ever again be a child with Down syndrome in Iceland” (Quijano, 2017). (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 Leonardo Vilaça Dupin, Ana Paula Perrota and Rosângela Pezza Cintrão can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/06/food-insecurity-under-the-microscope/. About the post: In November 2025, in Rio de Janeiro, the seminar Food (in)Security under the Microscope brought together researchers from different countries and professionals from various fields of knowledge to discuss inclusive sanitary norms for non-industrial food production. Biosafety requirements, which equate "food safety" with sterilization and the absence of microbiological contaminants, oversimplify the complex relationships between humans, non-humans, microbes, and their environments, and are generally at odds with the traditional knowledge and practices of family farmers, peasants, indigenous peoples, and traditional communities across Brazil. The seminar sought to bring interdisciplinary research and new evidence on the importance of microbiological diversity as constitutive of human and environmental health, contributing to a challenge of Pasteurian views that consider only its pathogenic (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 Debjani Chakraborty can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/domesticating-affordances-from-surveillance-to-navigation-of-interfaces-how-affordances-are-reappropriated-across-contexts-by-rural-indian-women/. About the post: Affordances across social media platforms… are reappropriated as a tool of surveillance, and become grounds for moral judgement of the user. For women in collectivist settings, like in many rural Indian villages, being online is not neutral. It is evaluated through reappropriation. Time spent on the phone can invite scrutiny: why is she online so often? Who is she talking to? For how long?

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/2026/05/why-do-we-weave-networks-mapping-the-common-territory-of-latin-american-feminist-anthropology-of-science-and-technology/. About the post: I watch time pass back and forth, back and forth. And I rest, thinking… why do we weave networks after all? (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 Sandrine Lambert can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/introducing-citizen-technology-ethnographic-insights-from-makerspaces/. About the post: Drawing on and challenging more familiar ideas such as citizen science and civic tech, the term citizen technology refers to technologies that are governable by and for citizens. For the author, the concept matters not only because it questions power in the production and application of technology, but also because of its practical relevance to education and other domains.