care | Platypus

STS Academic Publishing As a Work of Service and Hope: A Conversation with Vivette García-Deister

 Vivette García-Deister  June 19, 2025

Este contenido también está disponible en español

Thinking, writing, and publishing from Latin America pose significant challenges, especially for younger researchers. Academic work is affected by various kinds of asymmetries, but when we add to this the centrality of the English language and the predominance of theoretical perspectives from the Global North, the landscape becomes even more challenging. In response to this situation, several projects have emerged that view publishing as an intervention in the politics of knowledge. One such project that aims to undo these asymmetries and contribute to more horizontal practices is Tapuya: Latin American Science Technology and Society, an international journal that fosters conversations between the global North and South and helps its authors navigate the complexities of diverse languages and traditions of critical thinking. On this occasion, we had the opportunity to speak with Vivette García-Deister, the editor-in-chief of this journal. In this interview, she talks about why she considers academic publishing a service, how some editorial processes —such as reading, reviewing, and providing feedback— can theoretically and methodologically support young authors’ texts, and why publishing can be a form of hope. (read more...)

Is it Going to Be Okay? / Est-ce que ça va aller?

 Rine Vieth  February 21, 2023

This is is a multilingual comic that serves as a meditation on the infrastructures of COVID-19, care, and time. In the spirit of the multilingual spaces I inhabit in Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, I have chosen to write bilingually—a process that can be messy, but that speaks to my experiences of COVID-19 locally as I am thinking of COVID-19 globally. (read more...)

Screenshots of the Field: Viral Loads and the Contagious Potentials of Digital Ethnography

 Tankut Atuk  March 30, 2021

Metnin Türkçesine buradan erişebilirsiniz.

Over the course of the past six months, I have been actively doing fieldwork on HIV care in Turkey on Zoom. Believe it or not, for an anxious person like myself, who to this date did not approach or talk to anyone in the field without being completely soaked in sweat, I have actually been enjoying doing research online. I recognize the “anxieties, challenges, concerns, dilemmas, doubts, problems, tensions, and troubles” that arise from digital fieldwork, particularly given that the quality of being virtual does not guarantee exemption from gendered, ableist, and racialized violence. However, these issues do not exhaust the methodological possibilities and relational potentials of online research, which I address in this blog post. (read more...)

Living in a Time When “Death Feels Closer”

 Kristin Gupta  February 2, 2021

“I know I’m young, and dying isn’t something I’m ‘supposed’ to think about yet, but how can I not? Death feels like it is everywhere,” earnestly intoned Autumn, a twenty-five-year-old woman I met in late 2020. Autumn was a recent college graduate whose grandfather and roommate had both died during the vicious summer surge of Covid-19 in Los Angeles. The deep sense of loss she felt—not only from their deaths but also from the lack of national acknowledgment—had led her to seek out others whose lives had been touched by death. (read more...)

The Paradox of Autonomy and Care for Mothers of Adults with Disabilities in Brazil

 Helena Fietz  May 19, 2020

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

Since the early 2000s, Brazil has experienced a significant change concerning the rights of people with disabilities in the country. Based on the struggles of the Brazilian Disability Rights Movements, in 2009 the country promulgated the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) and in 2015 enacted the Brazilian Inclusion Law, also known as the Statute of People with Disabilities. The promotion of autonomy and the social participation of people with disabilities is at the core of these legislations. While these measures are not always accompanied by policies that can actually guarantee their implementation, they still impact people with disabilities in the way they foster such discourses around autonomy and independence. (read more...)

Zika, abortion, and care: the work that falls to women beyond the epidemic

 Claudia Rivera Amarillo  March 23, 2020

Este contenido está disponible en español aquí.

Feminist studies in geography, anthropology, and public health have indicated that women do more work during epidemics in terms of prevention and care (Rivera-Amarillo and Camargo 2020). In particular, this text explores two burdens that women have borne during the Zika epidemic: abortion and care for people with disabilities. I will briefly compare the cases of Colombia and Brazil, the countries most affected by Zika in the Americas, drawing attention to women’s bodies and rights, as well as to the debates on reproductive justice that took place during and after the epidemic outbreak that occurred between 2015 and 2016. (read more...)

Mine Detection Dog ‘Unit’: More Than Humans in the Humanitarian World

 Diana Pardo Pedraza  January 27, 2020

How to “clean” and “liberate” contaminated territories occupied by remnants of war? How to perceive and remove explosive devices specifically designed to evade detection? How to remedy and undo the suspicion deeply sown in rural landscapes? In the political context of peace negotiation and post-agreement in Colombia, land decontamination and (partial) recovery has not been an exclusively “human” humanitarian affair. On the contrary, other species and nonhuman actors have been indispensable in the work of detection and in the slow but essential effort to regain trust, not only among former enemies, but also between rural communities and territories. In the case of Colombia, mine-sniffing dogs have been the best co-laborers (de la Cadena 2015, 12). (read more...)

Negotiating Ethical Technology Use: Trust and Care in End-of-Life Conversations

 Julie Armin, Ellen Estrada, Rebecca Bedwell  September 3, 2019

The headline on the local news station’s website was sensational: “Bereaved Family Upset Kaiser Used Robot to Tell Father He Would Die”. Evoking some sort of post-modern dystopia, the article explains that the family “was taken by surprise when a robot rolled into the room” to deliver the news that an elder family member’s illness had progressed past the physician’s ability to treat it. While the robot actually was a remote physician using teleconferencing software to communicate with the patient and his family, the monitor projecting an image of the physician’s head and shoulders sat atop a tall, narrow metal unit reminiscent of a body. The “robot doctor” story was picked up by national news outlets, like the New York Times, and medical ethicists weighed in on the ethics of communicating “sensitive” topics remotely. The news stories problematized the impersonal, almost routinized, care as it was perceived by the family. In one, a representative from the American Medical Association commented, “We should all remember the power of touch – simple human contact – can communicate caring better than words.” (read more...)