This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Mayline Strouk can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/fragile-followings-leaving-and-returning-to-the-ecological-field/. About the post: This piece calls for renewed attention to returning to ecological field sites to conduct long-term monitoring studies. In marine ornithology, seabird colony monitoring – often carried out over the course of a career – shapes scientific trajectories, but financial support for such work remains largely limited and confined in short-term projects. In the social sciences, researchers are also expected to spend extended periods in the field to truly know and “own” it – until they move on to other projects and sites, following new positions and funding schemes. Taking the case of a petrel monitoring program in Iceland and an STS PhD thesis following it, I draw attention to the fragility of fieldwork, caught between the expectations and needs to stay and return to the field, and the realities of the precariousness faced by both researchers and the seabird populations they study. (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 Javed Siddiqui, Abdul Nayeem, Ambika Tandon, Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri, Isha Bhallamudi and Manju Goel can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/platform-workers-organizing-diaries-messages-from-union-organizers-to-researchers/. About the post: Researchers are increasingly applying collaborative and participatory approaches to work with and not on gig workers, union organizers, and platform cooperatives. In the last post of our series, we aim to contribute to these practices of actively building alternatives and strengthening movements, by speaking to three gig worker-organizers from India - Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed. We ask them, how do they view the role of researchers in the gig worker organizing landscape? How can researchers best support gig worker unions? What should we keep in mind when embarking on such collaborations? (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 Mpho Primus and Siri Lamoureaux can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/automating-language-losing-relationality-feminist-reflections-on-african-language-ai/. About the post: A grandmother pauses before answering a child. The meaning of her response lies not only in the words she chooses, but in tone, shared history, relationships, context, and even silence. Yet these are precisely the elements that today's Large Language Models struggle to capture. As AI expands into African languages, the focus has largely been on datasets, benchmarks, and model performance. But what happens when language is transformed into decontextualised text for computational processing? Drawing on perspectives from computational linguistics and linguistic anthropology, this article argues that language is not simply a collection of words - it is a relational, embodied social practice. We examine how current approaches to African language AI risk reproducing older assumptions about language while overlooking the cultural and social worlds that give it meaning.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katharina Rynkiewich can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/the-hotspot-as-a-sociotechnical-and-political-object-frontline-healthcare-professionals-and-public-conversation-alongside-the-intensification-of-a-u-s-measles-outbreak/. About the post: The post examines the utility of the term "hotspots," used to identify spatial clusters of infectious diseases, by looking at how it is taken up in the public discussion of the current United States measles outbreaks (2024—) and the practices of frontline healthcare professionals in South Florida. The author shows that hotspots are not just colloquial references to cases reported. Rather, they also signal the political and sociotechnical nature of epidemiological terms as they confront cultural contexts and public health infrastructure.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sumin Myung can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/stuck-among-the-trees/. About the post: In this second addition to our series on Stuckness, Sumin Myung shows how contemporary scientists have come to feel stuck about their work for an unlikely reason: scientific forestry’s history of successfully replenishing the country’s extensive mountain forests since the 1970s after decades of devastation under Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and postcolonial industrial development. For Myung’s interlocutors, this “success” of earlier forest regeneration programs has ironically unsettled what missions and directions their field ought to pursue going forward. This post points to how stuckness can be understood as a symptom of the narratives that our interlocutors presume in their scientific and technological endeavors, such as the narrative of earlier loss and subsequent success.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Abhigya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/charting-the-discourse-of-nature-restoration-the-eu-nature-restoration-law-in-the-public-sphere-in-czechia/. About the post: Looking closely at the public discourse pertaining to Nature Restoration Law in Czechia, one observes that the lines against which these interests cleave and coalesce remain fairly blurry. Even in the European Parliament, 21 members of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) voted in favour of the law, significantly tipping the outcome in its favour and reaffirming the volatile nature of interest-group allegiances.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Iván Flores can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/digital-porosity-and-value-in-suspension-informal-economies-and-video-games/. About the post: When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy. (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 Adwaita Banerjee can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/the-monsters-we-buried-plastics-swamp-men-and-the-unquiet-ground-of-deonar/. About the post: Banerjee leads us into the heart of the Deonar Dumping Ground in eastern Mumbai, conjuring its monstrous presence through the lived experience of those who work there and its own as an ethnographer. Yet the monster, he reveals, is not a single beast. It is the relentless collision of old plastics, the scars of colonial land-making, faltering municipal systems, damaged ecologies, and the tireless labor of workers who live with the city’s discarded past in the present.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/is-edtechs-stuckness-a-kind-of-fixation/. About the post: In this third addition to our series on stuckness, Martin Oliver and Jade Vu Henry suggest that the question of what emerges in the wake of getting stuck can also be a generative opening for scholarly reflexivity. In this piece on recent controversies around the use of AI assistants in classrooms in the United Kingdom, the authors situate this recent debate within a longer history in which new technology has repeatedly promised to revolutionize education and failed to materialize that claim. The current moment is not the first time when claims of technologically driven progress got stuck. By dwelling on this muddy history rather than focusing solely on the latest technology and its limits, Oliver and Henry offer a novel reading of the contemporary controversy around AI. This case highlights how stuckness can be a resource for scholars hoping to understand the enduring appeals and pitfall

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Victor Secco can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/07/searching-for-microbes-with-no-name-the-labour-of-sampling-and-the-making-of-scientific-value/. About the post: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with microbiome scientists on a sampling expedition along Europe's coastlines, this post follows the manual, embodied labour that turns soil, water, sand, and air into biological data. It argues that the value circulating in bioinformatics is created earlier, by hand, in the field—through the muddy, unglamorous work of collecting, labelling, and barcoding samples—even as that labour tends to disappear once samples are digitalized. It asks what counts as scientific work, where it happens, and who gets the credit for it.