This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Debjani Chakraborty can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/domesticating-affordances-from-surveillance-to-navigation-of-interfaces-how-affordances-are-reappropriated-across-contexts-by-rural-indian-women/. About the post: Affordances across social media platforms… are reappropriated as a tool of surveillance, and become grounds for moral judgement of the user. For women in collectivist settings, like in many rural Indian villages, being online is not neutral. It is evaluated through reappropriation. Time spent on the phone can invite scrutiny: why is she online so often? Who is she talking to? For how long?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Clarissa Reche can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/why-do-we-weave-networks-mapping-the-common-territory-of-latin-american-feminist-anthropology-of-science-and-technology/. About the post: I watch time pass back and forth, back and forth. And I rest, thinking… why do we weave networks after all? (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 Sandrine Lambert can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/introducing-citizen-technology-ethnographic-insights-from-makerspaces/. About the post: Drawing on and challenging more familiar ideas such as citizen science and civic tech, the term citizen technology refers to technologies that are governable by and for citizens. For the author, the concept matters not only because it questions power in the production and application of technology, but also because of its practical relevance to education and other domains.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Kaitlyn Kathleen Rabach can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/becoming-experts-activists-working-against-science-based-on-misinformation/. About the post: In County Donegal, Ireland an estimated 30,000 buildings are crumbling due to defective concrete. Because of a grave misdiagnosis by the Irish government, homeowners cannot rely on politicians to be up to date on the scientific claims regarding their crumbling homes. As a result, homeowners have had to become experts themselves to question the scientific authority of the Irish government and fight for 100% redress.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Nicole Ahoya can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/tech-ing-the-justice-gap-and-or-reimagining-access-to-justice-in-africa/. About the post: Access to justice has increasingly become a focus in international development, shaping new justice initiatives in countries in the so-called Global South. Often framed as a “justice gap” having caused a “justice crisis,” questions have not only arisen how to generate data on and measure this gap, but also about how to close it, e.g. by “teching” it through AI. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research, this piece examines how such “justice crisis” narratives and approaches to deal with them both expose and shape understandings of justice. Taking Kenya as an example, data-driven justice systems and technologies, such as AI, illustrate both the promise and tensions of such developments. Rather than treating the justice gap as a purely technical problem, the post asks how “desirable futures” of justice are imagined, whose knowledge counts, and who gets to participate in shaping them.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Jackie Ashkin, Alexander Foster and Madeline Augusta Turner can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/salt-a-provocation/. About the post: In this blogpost, we want to explore some of the ways that salt is emerging as a contested and existential matter of concern in the making of liveable environmental futures. By attending to the ways that salt reshapes environments and how we relate to them, we can foreground the material contingencies of continued economic, social, and political survival.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Thomson Chakramakkil can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/seeing-acting-believing-the-cyberknife-and-the-transformation-of-medical-imaging/. About the post: One cannot help but be convinced that this is what medical salvation looks like. In some respects, I am already a believer. In May 2025, a month after receiving a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis, I underwent image-guided radiation therapy under Dr. Sinha’s supervision, becoming one of the very few patients  approved for this advanced form of stereotactic radiosurgery. After months of misdiagnosis from pulmonologists working through experience and statistical generalisation, it was computer-aided imaging that revealed the adenocarcinoma that was rapidly spreading through my body. By looking at the MRI image, any oncologist could tell that my cancer had metastasized into the brain, creating eight lesions that could not be targeted through traditional chemotherapy. At this stage, even radiation therapy was, to borrow Julie Livingston’s words, “a necessary exercise in hope” (2012: 161).

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Bronte Jones can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/microbes-and-the-permeable-body-rethinking-health-through-the-holobiont/. About the post: As microbiome research unsettles our assumptions about microorganisms and the role they play in human bodies, the holobiont concept provides a framework for understanding health as relational and ecological.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Valeria Sánchez-Prieto can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/animals-in-war-multispecies-agency-and-the-memory-of-the-colombian-armed-conflict/. About the post: In one testimony from Colombia’s armed conflict, a parrot named Lola repeated the phrases she heard around her: “Paraco asesino” (“paramilitary murderer”), “Viva la guerrilla” (“long live the guerrilla”), and “The vultures are coming” Her voice condensed the sounds, fears, and political tensions of war into a multispecies archive of memory. Far from being passive witnesses, animals moved within the infrastructures of conflict as companions, alarms, transportation, and sometimes even weapons. Yet these violent incorporations are only the most extreme expression of a broader multispecies world of conflict. (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 Christina Kefala can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/05/making-for-the-feed-creativity-platforms-and-visibility-in-china/. About the post: In China, creative production is immediately embedded within circuits of monetization and visibility. Content can move seamlessly from aesthetic expression to commercial transaction, collapsing distinctions between artist, influencer, and entrepreneur.