This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Renzo Taddei can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/12/milei-crowds-and-concrete-waves-in-argentina/. About the post: Thousands of individuals were now one massive block moving up and down. The stands shook. I felt the largest reinforced concrete stand in the largest soccer stadium in South America tremble beneath my feet. For a second, I was filled with panic. If the vibration reached the resonance frequency, the disaster would be of monstrous proportions.

In this special episode, we revisit the 2023 edition of CASPR: CASTAC in the Spring, an annual online event held by CASTAC. This year, guest speakers convened to discuss the topic of "digital ethnography."

Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2023/12/platypod-episode-eight-caspr-2023/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ziya Kaya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/algorithmic-imaginations-in-agriculture-automation/. About the post: Agricultural digitization not only sparks the imagination of humans being replaced by automation and data but also creates participatory models in corporate settings that aim to incorporate farmers’ know-how and practices into technology development. This participatory approach to technology development contributes to capital accumulation in new ways in parallel with the digitalization of everyday life. Moreover, it leads to the emergence of novel imaginations about automated farm work while also redefining the value and the division of labor on farms.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Lucas Nishida can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/high-costs-entangled-politics-what-all-comes-inside-a-medications-packaging/. About the post: In this process, the medication is not merely a chemical compound but is a product of and produces a network of relationships: with clinical trials and research results, with research subjects and their hopes and activism, with a production industry and its private health logic, with international intellectual property agreements and patent records, with a global drug market. All of this comes imported with the medication packaging when it comes to incorporating the drug into SUS. (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 Madhura Rao can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/11/belly-versus-bin-how-digital-autoethnography-brought-me-back-from-the-brink-of-disordered-eating/. About the post: I had become adept at ignoring rancid smells and increasingly comfortable with cutting off mouldy bits before consuming a visibly deteriorating product. These developments concerned me but not enough to pause and reflect. If food was going in my belly, it was staying out of the bin and that was a good thing.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rebecca Carlson, Heikki Wilenius and Jonathan Corliss can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/on-algorithmic-divination/. About the post: Algorithms are tools of divination. Like cowry shells, scapular bones or spiders trapped under a pot, algorithms are marshaled to detect and relay invisible patterns; to bring to light a truth which is out there, but which cannot ordinarily be seen.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Adwaita Banerjee can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/plastic-chronicles-navigating-mumbais-material-mazes/. About the post: It is here, amidst a sea of discarded materials, that a relationship evolves—one between the waste pickers, the myriad forms of plastics, and the urban space that surrounds them. This bond is grounded in empirical observations that bring order to the chaotic array of plastics, tying together the intricate dance of humans and materials within the city's polyphonic rhythms.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Manon Lefevre can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/funeral-for-an-embryo/. About the post: Not long ago, it seemed that the science lab and the Catholic cemetery were two distinct worlds. Yet, surprising discursive and material connections complicate that dominant narrative. Rather, I found that the two sides of the laboratory walls were already entangled in surprising ways.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Gabrielle Hanley-Mott can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/how-to-imagine-the-unknown-choosing-an-arm-prosthesis/. About the post: An important cause of anxiety for her was how to choose a prosthetic and which one to choose. According to her, during one appointment, her doctor gave her a prosthetics catalog to look through, which she found useless. Without being able to see how someone would use different types of hooks, or someone to explain how two myoelectric elbows were different, that catalog was just a bewildering list with pictures.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sophie Katz can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/staring-contest/. About the post: In the ICU, I watch my patients closely with my eyes, my hands, my machines. The more carefully I monitor them, the more keenly I feel myself being watched by a gaze I ultimately cannot return. And am I not gazing at the patient in the same way?