This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Virendra Mathur and Aarjav Chauhan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/following-primates/. About the post: If the langurs moved to the agricultural fields or crossed the village, no data could be collected for a couple hours or more. In those moments, we would either wait, patiently hoping that the langurs would move to a “researchable zone”. Friction and conflicts were shaping research, and in turn, the science that was ultimately going to be produced. (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 Brittany Fields can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/the-limits-of-identity-how-race-and-gender-constructs-in-biometric-technology-narrow-who-we-are/. About the post: Identification through technologically assisted vision is therefore not revolutionary or transformative; instead, it perpetually sees others as they have always been seen. This line of sight ignores the immaterial, intangible, and unconscious but ever-present elements that constitute one’s being and shapes their becoming.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Alejandra Osejo-Varona, Karina Aranda and nicolás gaitán-albarracín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/experimental-methodologies-for-listening-to-the-present-an-interview-with-alejandra-osejo-varona/. About the post: Feminist critiques and environmental anthropology explore the human and the non-human as something in constant production in relation to other beings. This has helped to relativize the centrality of word and vision. It has made it possible to draw on other senses to produce ethnographic knowledge and has given rise to new, more experimental methods. (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 Elif Memis can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/the-politics-of-civic-education/. About the post: Educational institutions promote civic education through various simulations, to inform communities about democracy and citizenship. Although such practices indeed increase society’s knowledge in civics, the absence of marginalized communities’ representation ​​prevents societies from achieving an inclusive and representative democracy.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Yifan Xia can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/03/what-are-walking-simulators-ethnographically/. About the post: “Gaming” is conceptually branching out. It “virtually” overlaps with museum visuals and actively engages with lived cultures and heritage. Both developments point out that perhaps even with the prevalence of computation, there is still something we can learn from sociocultural anthropology, especially the anthropological ways of writing cultures – ethnography.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cheryl Hagan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/responsible-ai-in-action-beyond-policy-regimes/. About the post: Researchers at RAIL are acting in good faith and their research requires them to negotiate and make choices that result in both inclusion and exclusion. They are also making choices that have been structured by colonial legacies.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katrina Nicole Matheson can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/the-cyborg-is-dead-the-node-rises/. About the post: As social scientists, we can contribute to the creation of liberatory networks by shifting from investigations of embodied hybridity to examinations of nodality: why nodes connect and how they authenticate social constructions.  Arguably, this shift supports an epistemic departure from algorithmic Modernity to whatever qualitative, post-AI ethos may come next.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by A.R.E. Taylor can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/major-internet-outages-are-getting-bigger-and-occurring-more-often-a-reflection-on-the-crowdstrike-it-outage/. About the post: The CrowdStrike outage provided us with an eye-opening reminder of the vulnerabilities that arise from the centralization of computing infrastructure. When one corporation dominates its market to the extent that CrowdStrike does with endpoint security, the result is a single point of failure.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Emery Vanderburgh can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/02/disruptions-in-grace-embracing-mutation-and-disability-in-nature-through-art/. About the post: For disabled audiences, an artistic language that represents how we see our skills, barriers and bodies can help to unite us by updating our activism’s symbology to match new theories of disability.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Amrita Kurian can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/01/thinking-with-epistemic-things-quality-and-its-consequences-in-agri-commodities-markets/. About the post: What happens when an "epistemic thing"—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the pages collated from a scientific symposium and introduced into the real world?