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?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Rosario Rm can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/on-menstruation-and-feeling-shame/. About the post: Menstruation as a subject of study is not new. Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Bobel, Miren Guillo, and Karina Felitti, among many others, have discussed how menstruation has been related to specific practices, and how taboos present great dynamism and variability as specific cultural constructions frequently linked to systems of bodily control and gender. In this article, I present the advances of research that explores how taboos associated with menstruation are reflected in the bodily and emotional trajectory of menstruating women and people through the implementation of a methodology based on the collective construction of emotional corpobiographies (Ramírez, 2024). (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 Valerie Berseth can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/swimming-against-the-current-navigating-distrust-in-open-science/. About the post: In the effort to build trust in science, the complexities of distrust must be confronted. Open science practices alone are unlikely to address deeper issues of power and people’s past experiences with technology, particularly in times of increasing scarcity and uncertainty.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Matias Milia can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/12/commons-in-science-and-technology-dispatches-from-the-seekcommons-network/. About the post: As a distributed network of researchers, technologists, and environmental activists, we proposed, therefore, to shift the frame from debates about the promises and perils of “openness” to the anthropological question of the “common” as a mode of participatory governance that sits in between markets and states, but also, and most importantly, as a political principle for community-building around common tools and approaches to socio-environmental studies.