This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Hannah Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/laughter-and-dreaming-of-wins-in-recovery/. About the post: At Alliance Wellness, I also noticed how young Somali American men turn to humor and laughter to socialize experiences of sobriety or resist the structure and authority of Alcoholics Anonymous discourse while establishing rebellious rhythms and narratives of sobriety. However, as I played Ludo with these young men, I became more interested in how laughter also served as a ventilator of life and a space to imagine victory. The moment Somali American men entered their sober-living facilities, I would hear deep sighs of exhaustion and relief. Evenings at these sober homes became a site of raaxo (Somali for ease or pleasure) or nasasho (Somali for rest), phrases these young Somali American men informed me were among the many Somali words for healing.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Andrew Wiebe can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/toward-a-linked-data-approach-to-shifting-identities-and-null-values-in-data-sets/. About the post: Acknowledging shifting identities and embracing NULL values complicates data analysis but can ultimately produce more accurate and respectful records.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes and Felipe Figueiredo can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/data-centers-transnational-collaborations-and-the-differing-meanings-of-connection/. About the post: As anthropologists researching data centers, one of our goals is to point to a deeper timeline of events that have given form to what data centers are today. Our goal is to put data centers in context, and to reject narratives that place them outside of history. In putting data centers in context, we understand that the technology and infrastructure supporting current data centers are not new or exist thanks to the works of a single mind – putting data centers in context shows how digital technologies of the 21st are enacting forbindelse, they’re combining pre-existing infrastructures and creating new relationships with other material technologies. They’re connected to the past, despite the focus of the tech industry in a distant future, and their rejection of history.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jiwon Kim can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/from-bin-to-bank-recycling-household-waste-in-urban-indonesia/. About the post: Environmental activists and industry professionals were hesitant to view them more than “housewives’ plaything (main-mainan).” The quantity of waste banks’ contribution to handling household waste pale in comparison to that of the informal waste pickers. Meanwhile, the members of waste banks themselves often describe their activity as “just social (sosial),” implying its communal nature is predicated on the absence of economic aspirations. This essay is an attempt to create a generative interval between them—one that pauses before settling into any singular narrative, allowing the complexity of waste bank practices to surface. (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 Sebastian Zarate can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/who-will-protect-andean-potatoes-in-the-near-future-uncertainties-about-the-next-generation-of-native-potato-conservationists/. About the post: While potato farmers have been referred to as “guardians” of agrobiodiversity, little attention has been brought to the precarity of the continuity of this guardianship. The lack of youth and women farmers present at annual meetings and events puts into question who will be the agrodiversity guardians when the older generations of potato farmers pass on. (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 Allie E.S. Wist can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/bodies-as-proxies-or-the-stratigraphic-evidence-of-our-appetites-at-metabolic-scales-from-the-human-to-the-planetary-on-the-occasion-of-the-anthropocenes-ongoing-debate-about-itself/. About the post: In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. Through the generative space of contradictions, it serves as a somewhat experimental back-and-forth between permeable anthropos bodies and the epoch defined by the materials transgressing those bodies; between tangible forms of evidence and ephemeral ones; between precision and porosity.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Misria Shaik Ali can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/04/witnessing-the-porous-world/. About the post: This blog series emerges from porous interventions at the intersections of environmental humanities and science and technology studies whereby scientized objects are opened to the world they animate through ethnographic engagements.

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 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.)