Platypod, The CASTAC Podcast

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Maria Isabel Trivilin can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/broilers-that-cant-even-fend-for-themselves-mother-hens-and-production-infrastructures/. About the post: In this post, Maria Isabel Trivilin immerses readers in southern Brazil's industrial broiler production. Through close-up ethnographic observation, she explores the web of relationships that emerges within confinement spaces, where broilers, unlike free-range chickens, can’t even fend for themselves. The agribusiness assemblage shaping their lives before they become food is woven from industrial, economic, political, and ethical interests, microbial science, and human care. Ultimately, Trivilin compels us to ask: Who is caring for whom — and who suffers from care’s violence — in a setting where death is the inevitable outcome? (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 Marie Comuzzo can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/listening-with-whales-song-grief-and-obligation-across-ways-of-knowing/. About the post: Who do we listen with and who do we recognize as meaningful producers of culture? Listening with Whales is a digital commons that brings scientific, artistic, musical, ancestral, poetic, trans, queer, decolonial, Black, Indigenous, and embodied forms of listening into conversation to reshape the ways we relate with one another within the worlds we share.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Huntington can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/my-unemployment-in-the-time-of-ai/. About the post: AI has widened the liminal space of unemployment, and the “limitless” capability of AI job-seeking tools has also exploded. This all felt like putting out a fire with a bucket of fire—and finding my way out required a very different kind of network.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiffany Prendergast can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/softmaxxing-skepticism-how-looksmaxxing-culture-recruits-the-mainstream/. About the post: Because institutional medicine offers no real answer to aesthetic anxiety, the underground is able to fill the gap using rhetoric anti-vaccine influencers have already normalized. Peptide vendors and biohacking gurus borrow directly from that playbook: "Big pharma doesn't want you to know," "your doctor is behind the times," and "take health into your own hands." Anti-establishment framing isn't an accident here; it's baked into the pitch because the premise is that official channels already failed you.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Luisa Madrigal Marroquín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/imagined-geographies-from-urban-expertise-to-rural-health-intervention/. About the post: This post looks at how health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. The author argues that they also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. (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 Juan Camilo Ospina Deaza can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyond-deficit-toward-a-strengths-based-approach-to-male-infertility/. About the post: Concerns about declining sperm quality and male reproductive capacity have become increasingly prominent in scientific, clinical, and public discussions of fertility. Yet infertility has historically been located within women’s bodies and treated primarily as a women’s problem, placing women under disproportionate reproductive responsibility, scrutiny, blame, and clinical intervention. This framing has also contributed to men’s reproductive bodies and experiences receiving comparatively limited attention. Growing concern about male reproductive capacity has been accompanied by increasing attention to how male fertility might be preserved, improved, and optimised, alongside broader demographic narratives that frame declining reproductive capacity as a potential threat to future populations. (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 Lucy Pei can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/transnational-solidarity-exploring-alternate-global-imaginaries-of-work/. About the post: What is the significance of gig worker activists’ claim on the global scale in relation to reclaiming the futures of work? Following Anna Tsing, I consider scale to be “not just a neutral frame for viewing the world” but instead as something that “must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects,” (Tsing, 2005, p. 58). The sample book cover image and slogans are examples of how activists self-consciously claimed the global scale. A gig worker’s complaints can be viewed as a personal-scale problem to be solved by finding a new job or getting reinstated. A union can assert itself as focused on the scale of the factory, the company, the city, or the nation. A social movement can style itself as being local or it can argue that the issues it addresses are global in scale. In addition

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Catherina Wilson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/smart-methods-whatsapp-ethics-and-inclusive-knowledge-production/. About the post: Digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have offered methodological opportunities for connection, data collection, and the democratization of knowledge production, in part because they are easily accessible and affordable. The advantages notwithstanding, we must critically reflect on the limitations and ethical implications of these digital platforms. Because WhatsApp is integrated into the lives of our research participants, it proved to be a useful tool during our own collaborative analysis and writing process too.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Fatima Tariq can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/time-virtuality-and-the-digital-sacred/. About the post: The above scene from Ramy (Season 2, Episode 7) depicts an absurd yet moving moment featuring characters Mo and Ahmed performing umrah through VR headsets. As Mo embraces the virtual Ka’aba, he tearfully breaks down; we see a performance of embodied devotion through his digitally mediated umrah experience. While VR pilgrimages remain niche and laughable to many, their use by some travel agencies and religious groups to practice for actual pilgrimage highlights how digital technologies are reshaping sacred journeys. This project attempts to interrogate how digital mediation transforms spatiotemporal logics of religious practice particularly through the lens of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981, Agha 2007), the co-constituion of time and space in narrative and interaction. Linguistic anthropology’s concept of chronotope may help us unpack this tension.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ambar Reyes can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/beyond-delivering-food-networks-risk-and-the-hidden-infrastructure-of-gig-work/. About the post: Delivery workers do not merely use communication platforms; they inhabit and transform them into sociotechnical infrastructures of collective life. Through these arrangements, knowledge, social relations, moral authority, and identity are actively produced and maintained. In tracing the circulation of information, responsibility, and care across urban and transnational space, this blogpost reveals how systems designed for labor extraction are repurposed as infrastructures of care, accountability, and collective knowledge across neighbourhoods and national borders. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)