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?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Muneezay Jaffery can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/10/the-wild-pantry/. About the post: The project we are working on is Plant Planet Plate, which brings together the work of the Green Shoots Foundation, which is led by me (a geographer), in rural development and agriculture with the research and skills in plant humanities of Dr. Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam, a medical anthropologist. Our fieldwork consists of conducting 50 interviews with people living in Oddar Meanchey Province, located in the North West of Cambodia, on wild foods and medicinal plants that they forage.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sandra Avila and Marisol Marini can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/the-day-i-discovered-i-was-collaborating-on-a-eugenics-project-on-imponderables-in-collaborative-research/. About the post: One day Avila realized that the recommendation she had received from the dermatologist to exclude samples of fingernails, palms, and feet did not simply exclude "confusing samples," as the specialist stated, but the possibility of identifying the highest incidence of skin cancer in black populations, which occurs precisely in those parts of the body with the lowest melanin index. (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 Patrick Kho can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/making-companion-species-at-a-robotics-lab/. About the post: Approaching robots as companion species, we find the significance of storytelling in robot experiments. We find that science fiction fundamentally shapes the research questions asked, while research findings pose serious considerations regarding humans. In robotics research, then, humans and robots are constantly re-constructed, re-shaped, and re-defined by one another.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Maggie Mang can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/blooming-biomes-mean-blooming-profits-nature-based-industrial-farming-and-the-politics-of-the-industrial-animal-microbiome/. About the post: This blog post details how hype, imaginations, and promises over the industrial animal microbiome circulate in industrial agritech circles. Such images, claims, and examples drive home the point that industrial animal metabolism – and the probiotic, ‘natural,’ patented tools designed to optimize it – is considered to be a profitable next frontier.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/09/ai-as-a-feminist-issue/. About the post: For this episode, we'll read a story written earlier this year. This is a story about the public funding of artificial intelligence in the US and how that's a feminist issue. We asked aman agah, a scholar and researcher in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, to read the story for us.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Anna Zhang can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/female-truck-drivers-in-china-navigate-gender-norms-on-douyin/. About the post: Over the course of a month, I examined the content of four popular female truck drivers on the platform. I explored how their efforts to change the narrative of truck driving and empower themselves and their peers are both informed by and confronted with gendered norms. Their experiences reveal the entanglement of gender inequalities in the seemingly distant worlds of shipping and online entertainment.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nick Surawy Stepney and Nishanth Kunnukattil Shaji can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/between-pain-and-relief-morphines-ambiguities-in-india/. About the post: Morphine, the gold standard of medically prescribed painkillers, offers a troubling medical story, evoking in equal measure the contingent histories of pleasure and war, relief and addiction, commerce, and regulation.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Cydney Seigerman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/madam-cistern/. About the post: It’s been a long time since someone has fetched water from me. I’m old now, dried up… it rained a lot this winter, but I am no longer able to hold on to the rain that falls. My time has come to an end… (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 Colin Garon can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2023/08/fake-real-real-fake-salvarsan-on-the-us-medical-market/. About the post: Who could claim medical expertise? Should healers be allowed to advertise? What cures should laypeople be able to purchase for themselves? In the case of Salvarsan, the complex interplay of fakery and reality, which Cramp sought to discipline into clearly bounded regimes of (il)legitimacy, was in fact dictated by complex pattens of production and distribution, advertising and demand, and epistemic and therapeutic authority.