Misfits in the Breach: Between Ecology and Economy in Helen Humphreys’s Wild Dogs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines Helen Humphreys’s 2004 novel Wild Dogs, arguing that the narrative offers resistant responses to the seamless models of ecology and economy that are currently articulated by neoliberal culture. The often difficult lives of the canine and human misfits that populate the novel, alongside their sometimes unexpected actions and decisions, call attention to the inadequacy of ecological and economic narratives that would promise full and perfect, if cutthroat, functionality. The novel not only illustrates the socioeconomic and epistemic ill effects of a zero-sum neoliberal ideology of economic efficiency, but perhaps more importantly for situating neoliberalism within an ecocritical frame, the novel also interrogates the ecological dog-eat-dog story of “nature” that so often serves as the alibi for today’s spiralling and violent economic designations of biopolitical disposability. Both dogs and humans in Wild Dogs embody rankling remainders of the common-sense predator-prey binary; in the process, they initiate forms of care and relationship unaccounted for by the speculative presumptions of neoliberal biopolitics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".