Today on #Platypus, Ana Paula Perrota, @leodupin.bsky.social and Rosângela Cintrão explore how industrial sanitary norms render traditional food cultures illegal in Brazil, and what that reveals about whose knowledge counts in global food safety regimes
Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/food...
#CASPR2026
"There are pockets of interventions for anthropology into tech and labor conversation, such as with policymakers. We can have anthropology in the center", is part of the breakout room on technology within anthropology reflection.
"We need to remain hopeful" as an insight!
#CASPR2026
We started our last section! Reporting on the breakout rooms
On Worker Education the moderators reflect:
"What are we teaching people and how in the classroom we design talk about tech culture and ways of relating on how to analyze objects and the labour dynamics behind them".
Today on #Platypus, Aylar Abdolahzadeh traces what ancient campfire debris reveals about human resilience. From striking sparks to keeping a flame alive, fire is a learned skill, and archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals used it flexibly.
Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/trac...
#CASPR2026 is done. Thank you to our guests for their generous contributions and insights for anthropological work regarding technology and computing! We hope you had an enriching dialogue, and we look forward to keeping in touch with you on all our platforms! ❤️
From prenatal screening to AI genome prediction, new technologies are reshaping which bodies are considered desirable, productive, and "normal."
Read the full post here: blog.castac.org/2026/06/is-t...
Today on #Platypus, Debjani Chakraborty explores how mobile phone affordances are reappropriated across rural Indian contexts, sometimes as tools of navigation and aspiration, and at other times as mechanisms of surveillance and moral scrutiny.
Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/dome...
Today on #Platypus, Alejandro Cerón examines how epidemiologists navigate the tension between technical expertise and political objectives towards outbreak mitigation, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala and the enduring myth of John Snow.
Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/outb...
#CASPR2026
"How software has an AI component and how does that impact the knowledge we produce with ethnography", is a key idea of the Ethnography then and now breakout room led by Platypus Editor, Kim Fernandes.
CASTAC
New reproductive and bodily intervention biotechnologies not only promise to cure or prevent diseases, but are also shaping a new regime of bodily normalization that redefines which lives are desirabl...
