‘The Gift that Keeps on Giving’: Unveiling the Paradoxes of Fair Trade Shea Butter
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fair trade has garnered the interest of western consumers seeking ‘ethical’ products. Inherent to the movement's success are narratives that foster an attachment between reflexive consumers and the distantly situated producers of their goods. These narratives entice consumers to purchase higher priced, quality fair trade products. Drawing on empirical evidence from a case‐study of fair trade shea butter produced by women in B urkina F aso and consumed by E uropean and N orth A merican women, this article considers the extent to which these narratives reflect producer experiences. Fair trade shea butter is depicted as an exotic, traditional, authentic, and ethical product that promotes global female solidarity. Yet, the international commodity differs significantly from the traditional and authentic product that is locally produced and traded. Moreover, the low returns butter producers earn for their product cast doubts on the ‘fairness’ and solidarity aspects of the movement. Hence, we argue that rather than unveiling the conditions of commodity production, fair trade discourses repackage these to appeal to ethically minded consumers likely to purchase fair trade goods.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it