The materials of practice: Nuclear warheads, rhetorical commonplaces and committee meetings in Russian–Atlantic relations
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
In this article I argue that the Cartesian dualism informing dominant theories of International Relations (IR) has limited analytical purchase at the level of practice. The materials that enable and constrain contemporary diplomatic practices between NATO and Russia seamlessly combine natural, cultural and organizational artefacts: nuclear warheads take on a symbolic life of their own; linguistic formulations transform into ‘things’; and committee meetings inscribe intersubjective dynamics with a new materiality. To materialist theories à la neo-realism, practice theory shows that material objects matter not because they have an immanent meaning, but rather because, in becoming part of social relations, they acquire a form of agency of their own, making people do things they would not have done otherwise. To IR constructivism, this article demonstrates that it is not only people who attach meanings to things; things also attach meanings to people. Enmeshed in social relations, material objects often acquire an epistemic life of their own that may affect, in turn, the very people who constructed them.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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