1 - Wasted Citizenship? Reclaimers and the Privatised Expansion of the Public Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A large body of literature explores changes in the public sphere relatedto the transfer of services and activities performed by the public intothe private sector. Less attention has been paid, however, to theprivatised expansion of the public sphere. This article explores such aprocess in Metsimaholo, South Africa, where the municipality soughtto bring landfill recycling into the realm of public policy through apublic-private partnership. As informal reclaimers had salvagedrecyclables at the dump for several decades, this contract amounted toan enclosure of the waste commons which dispossessed them of controlover their livelihood and confined them to the informal economy.Countering structuralist accounts of accumulation by dispossessionand top-down approaches to governmentality, the article focuses onhow reclaimers contested these processes. It argues that before thereclaimers could negotiate with the state, they needed to mount an‘ontological insurrection’ to counter their dismissal as mere ‘detritus’and demand that the conception of the public sphere be expanded toinclude them as legitimate actors in the realm of public policy. Whilethis may result in a reconfiguration of the public sphere, it is unclearwhether it would challenge the current privatised nature of itsexpansion.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".