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.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Joyce Lu, Katharina Rynkiewich and Pat Kinley can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/04/from-hotspots-to-outbreaks-keywords-for-ungrounding-space-temporality-and-the-boundaries-of-infection/. About the post: This series examines the spatial, temporal, and conceptual boundaries of infection. As a primarily analytic approach, the authors in this series unpack epidemiologic keywords such as outbreak, hotspot and epidemic, to assess their uptake, uses and meanings amongst scientists, public health and healthcare practitioners, experts and broader publics. (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 Misria Shaik Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/on-resolving-controversies-enduring-regulatory-neglect-in-southern-tamil-nadu/. About the post: This post addresses how the controversy around the Kudankulam nuclear power Plant is being resolved, nearly 15 years after the 2011 protest where around 9000 people were charged with sedition and 55000 under several other charges. The post treats resolutions in three ways: resolving between multiple aspects and interest groups in a controversy, resolution as clarity about a controversy by meaning of accounting for the diverse perspectives, knowledges in decision making, and the resolved-ness against regulatory neglect. Resolving scientific controversies are significant to a dignified existence in the age of environmental in the age of environmental contamination, plagued by compounded causes and vulnerabilities. As science procedurally solves contamination’s cause, victims in contaminated places await technoscientific answers to establish regulatory accountability.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Samiksha Bhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/the-human-cost-of-precision/. About the post: The use of AI tools in diagnostics claims to shorten the long and exhausting "diagnostic odyssey" of people with rare diseases. As a result, AI-assisted diagnostics is being framed as a 'disruptive technology' able to deliver precise diagnoses or diagnostic cues in just minutes. This piece questions the claim of disruption arguing that it is precision instead that becomes an ideal under late capitalism and shapes how technologies are valued as benevolent. Working through what Anibal Quijano called the 'colonial matrix of power', precision diagnostics that promise to care for sick and disabled bodies depend on the uneven labor conditions in the global South that perpetuate conditions of harm and distress for data and healthcare workers. Connecting these seemingly parallel developments in precision medicine and the data economy pushes us to confront the human costs of precision.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Eva Steinberg can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/love-at-first-sprout-wild-peanuts-and-mars-plan-for-climate-security/. About the post: Despite the toxicity and the chromosome doubling and the botanical reality of peanut reproduction, Mars’s portrayal of peanut breeding as an all-natural gendered family unit contrasts the stability of the nuclear family with the instability of climate change. In doing so, the commodity, in this case Mars candies, becomes an essential safeguard against total climate and societal collapse–a world without peanuts.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Meenakshi Mani can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/engineering-through-stuckness/. About the post: In this first addition to our series on Stuckness, Meenakshi Mani shows that the everyday work of typically well-paid tech professionals—whether that be within specific domains like EdTech or within Big Tech—are by no means without frustration. As actors within an organization and a social network, these seemingly powerful workers find themselves constantly having to navigate hierarchies and make compromises. These moments of stuckness help illuminate the structural forces and material conditions that constrain the range of possibilities involved in technology building. By tracing stories of tech workers from India and the U.S, Meenakshi suggests that in the shared experience of stuckness, there are perhaps alliances to be conceived between different types of tech work and tech workers, across the Majority and Minority worlds.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jonathan Givan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/hip-hop-sampling-and-the-akai-mpc-as-a-platform-for-spatiotemporal-discourse/. About the post: This analysis moves away from exploring Hip Hop as a particular Black political action taking sonic form and towards an ontology of Black American Hip Hop production. This shift is valuable because the sonic underpinning of the beat is what contextualizes and informs the lyrical production done in real time by the emcee during the process of writing and recording their lyrics. In doing this contextualizing work, Hip Hop music producers redeployed the sampler as not just a musical instrument but as a platform on which new forms of dialogue were able to blossom.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Michelle Venetucci and Shoko Yamada can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/03/series-theorizing-stuckness-in-science-and-technology/. About the post: What might we learn by studying science and technology through the lens of stuckness? Scientific and technological practice has long been associated with notions of progress as a linear development, linked to key moments in history and developments that have led to our present moment. In this new series on Platypus, scholars who work directly with scientists and technological experts instead foreground moments of thwarted expectations and material constraints, highlighting that experts themselves do not necessarily experience their work as congruent with these notions of progress. By attending to moments when experts face obstacles to their work and feel stuck, the essays in this series draw out how people construct meaning out of these moments of becoming stuck, which then follows them into future decision-making.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rachel Lim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/02/there-is-a-climate-emergency-and-its-called-colonialism/. About the post: In this piece, author and artivist Rachel Lim highlights how the climate crisis is not a sudden "emergency" but the cumulative result of centuries of colonial dispossession and extraction. Lim critiques "crisis language," noting it often sidelines Indigenous sovereignty and favors capitalist expansion over genuine accountability. By drawing on academic scholarship and solidarity work with land defenders from the Wet’suwet’en to the Amazon, Lim highlights how "green transitions" can replicate colonial violence if they ignore Indigenous jurisdiction. The piece serves as a call to move beyond fear-driven rhetoric toward a framework of reciprocity and history. Accompanied by Lim's illustration, "Rooted in Our Heart," the article demands that climate action addresses colonialism as its root cause to achieve true justice.