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/2024/10/chaotic-oscillation-understanding-the-paradoxical-presence-of-video-games-in-contemporary-society/. About the post: Common sense tells us that play and work are opposing categories. However, in our society, we often encounter situations where the boundaries between these two categories become difficult to distinguish. It's common that people earn money from hobbies—activities that common sense typically does not associate with the effort required for any form of work and mostly because they are fun. These include recording oneself dancing on the street, doing product unboxings, or streaming while playing video games. (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 María Fernanda Lartigue Marín can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/critical-metals-magic-tricks-and-energy-transition-a-social-biography-of-lithium/. About the post: By exploring lithium's social biography, I hope to offer an example of ways in which anthropology can interrogate the magic tricks and technofixes that have come into existence in the context of global cooperation for climate change mitigation. (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 Cody Skahan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/geoengineering-de-facto-environmental-governance-and-alternative-future-making/. About the post: In the absence of an appropriate governing institution, de facto governance (i.e., governance that does not proceed through “proper” channels) of geoengineering has occurred through its inclusion in a series of high-level scientific reports without being subjected to in-depth political questioning about how geoengineering will affect or be affected by notions of justice, power, and responsibility. This governance vacuum has excluded youth and Indigenous People (some of which who are also youth) alike from discourses around geoengineering, a common theme in international environmental governance.

Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration chronicles the author’s journey as a scholar and a young woman working in the commercial space industry in the US. It also talks about the difficulties of gaining access to certain technical field sites. Transcript available at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/space-anthropology-with-savannah-mandel/

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Beatriz Klimeck can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/09/from-a-hashtag-to-the-right-for-indoor-air-quality-a-short-story-of-the-covidisairborne-movement/. About the post: Isolated during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to follow on Twitter (social media platform now called X) a few scientists who were dedicating part of their time to share information about disease prevention. From that personal curiosity emerged an interest in a feud happening between tweets, likes and retweets: the World Health Organization had tweeted a "fact-checking" publication stating that Covid was not airborne. (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 Ana Paula Pimentel Jacob can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/foucault-dialectics-and-randomized-clinical-trials-bridges-between-medicine-and-anthropology/. About the post: I hope that other scientists understand anthropology, but at the same time, it’s essential that anthropology also enters other spaces and accepts invitations outside of its own citadel. (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 Cydney Seigerman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/from-foraging-to-keeping-bees-in-northeast-brazil/. About the post: For Rogério and other meleiros, greater awareness of the environmental impact of their foraging practices developed  through their transition from meleiro to apicultor (apiarist or beekeeper). Yet some former meleiros explained that they eventually began to cut out only part of the beehive to preserve the colony’s integrity, illustrating how the introduction of beekeeping was not required for all meleiros to develop greater environmental awareness. (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 Mine Egbatan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/commodifying-disability-as-an-experience/. About the post: In this post, I explore how disability is depoliticized when it is reduced to an individual, sensory experience within technologically reproduced spaces, isolated from the social, cultural, and political constructions of disability in Turkey. Does the sensory experience of disability reveal new ways of understanding the “other”?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Amanda Quan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/medicine-disoriented/. About the post: What follows is an object collection that troubles the arrival of The Clinic by engaging the historic underpinnings, cultural logics, and afterlives of its object parts. I think with the concept of simulation as one that refuses stable orientation as I deconstruct The Clinic, fold back its walls, and examine how each component is socially and politically entangled. Moving beyond the functional utility of clinical objects, I reorient my attention to their social lives and stories in order to unravel the directions of white hegemony which have shaped medicalized subjectivities, categories of citizenship, and diagnostic consequences in contemporary campaigns of exclusion. This is a project that aims to disorient and reorient by destabilizing object surfaces and welcoming alternative paths of arrival.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Madelyn Zander can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2024/08/the-cloud-is-too-loud-spotlighting-the-voices-of-community-activists-from-the-data-center-capital-of-the-world/. About the post: In this post, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2021 with community activists in Northern Virginia, a place known as the “data center capital of the world,” to bring the cloud’s emerging sound pollution problem into focus.