Luísa Reis Castro

@anthrobite.bsky.social

Anthropologist of science, health & the environment in an unequal 🌍 | thinks a lot about Brasil & bugs 🦟 🦠 Assistant Prof @usc.edu; before MIT, Maastricht Univ, UFMG Spending 2025–2026 in Deutschland @hanse-ias.bsky.social ela/she/sie

Please circulate: www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/news/call-ap... Seeking 10 Early Career Fellows to participate in 2 summer academies to be held in Berlin June 14–18, 2027 & June 26–30, 2028: SCIENCE IMAGINES ITS FUTURE. How have scholars deliberated about investing scarce resources in an uncertain future?

Call for Applications: Summer Academy on "Science Imagines Its Future" | MPIWG

Call for Applications: Summer Academy on "Science Imagines Its Future" (Deadline November 1)

mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

An aircraft passenger oxygen mask: a drop down passenger mask with air bag and yellow plastic mouth and nose cover, oxygen tube has been cut; Demonstration model used by flight attendant crew for passenger instruction. Has text on the side indicating that it's non-functional.

Oh, here is the abstract @amanthro.bsky.social When I have more time, I'll do a thread about the works I discuss in the essay. I should also add that there is so much great multispecies/more-than-human scholarship that choosing what to teach/what to include in this review was quite a challenge.

Political Animals: To Live & Die in More-Than-Human Worlds
Luísa Reis-Castro

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to live—and therefore die—in a more-than-human world? This review essay explores that question through reflections on teaching Political Animals: Species, Class, Race, and Gender, an undergraduate course that introduces students to scholarship on human-nonhuman relations. Organized around four questions—What are the politics of connections in more-than-human worlds? What is health or well-being when some multispecies relations can cause harm and death? Who counts as human? And how might the human-animal “divide” be reimagined?—the course investigated how encounters and entanglements between diverse beings, as well as the boundaries between humanity and animality, are shaped by power, hierarchy, and enduring inequalities. Tracing how these debates unfolded in the classroom, I argue that multispecies scholarship, despite critiques that it sidelines social inequalities by supposedly bypassing the human, can instead offer new ways of thinking through race, class, gender, colonialism, and the contested meanings of being human. In doing so, I show how the classroom offers a distinctive vantage point from which to examine how anthropological ideas travel beyond academic debates. Teaching more-than-human relations becomes a way of preparing students to grapple with the political and ethical stakes of living—and dying—in a shared world.
Luísa Reis Castro@anthrobite.bsky.social · 2w ago

This review essay was quite fun to write! It's based on a course I have been teaching @usc.edu for the past few years. My main argument is that examining the relationship between humans & nonhumans/animals offers a productive way to investigate power structures. OA here: doi.org/10.1111/aman...

This review essay was quite fun to write! It's based on a course I have been teaching @usc.edu for the past few years. My main argument is that examining the relationship between humans & nonhumans/animals offers a productive way to investigate power structures. OA here: doi.org/10.1111/aman...

<em>American Anthropologist</em> | AAA Anthropology Journal | Wiley Online Library

What does it mean to live—and therefore die—in a more-than-human world? This review essay explores that question through reflections on teaching Political Animals: Species, Class, Race, and Gender, a...

doi.org

É revoltante demais! A gente tá falando de meninas de 10, 12 anos, que são estupradas, engravidam, não tem nem corpo pra aguentar uma gestação e um parto. E o Congresso defensor de estuprador decide q essas meninas devem parir, nem q morram no caminho www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/06/02/n...

Na calada, Senado aprova projeto que dificulta aborto legal em crianças estupradas

Em votação simbólica que durou menos de cinco minutos, o plenário do Senado Federal aprovou, nesta terça-feira (2), um projeto de decreto legislativo (PDL) que revoga uma resolução do Conselho…

brasildefato.com.br

73% of mothers with kids under 18 are in the workforce. More than flowers or brunch, working moms need: -Paid family leave -Equal pay -Universal childcare -Universal healthcare (But get your mom flowers, too)

I've spent yesterday and today talking to researchers across the globe trying to understand the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius. My story in @science.org is here (and some threaded thoughts coming): www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪 #IDsky

Cruise ship’s hantavirus outbreak puts researchers in uncharted territory

Questions about the culprit virus and its route of spread remain as health officials make plans for stranded passengers

science.org

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

NATURE has done a terrific (if depressing) job of summarizing the devastating cuts to science during Trump's first year. At this point, only the willingness of the House and Senate to restore research budgets prevents scientific extinction. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains

A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

nature.com

Q: China, Russia, and Iran have interests in Venezuela. How does this operation affect your relationships with them? TRUMP: In terms of other countries that want oil, we're in the oil business. We're gonna sell it to them. We'll be selling oil.

My takeaway from every new Epstein revelation is that some powerful people victimized many powerless young women, many more knew, some actively enabled it--and we're still being told that MeToo and accountability for sexual violence have gone too far