‘Trash-talk’ and the production of quotidian geopolitical boundaries in the USA–Mexico borderlands
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
This paper draws attention to the intimate frontiers of geopolitics to analyze how quotidian political boundaries are delineated and disputed through mundane discursive practices. My empirical focus is the USA–Mexico borderlands wherein US citizens frequently encounter material evidence of undocumented immigrants and their (unauthorized) border crossings. The materials encountered include identity documents and personal mementos as well as objects needed for survival like water bottles, backpacks, medication, shoes, and clothes. Close encounters with these intimate objects, I argue, have become primary sites wherein everyday framings of belonging are constituted in the borderlands. Drawing on field research in Arizona, I illustrate how cultural prescriptions for bodily comportment in relation to these objects are enlisted in the production and disruption of quotidian framings of ‘American’ or ‘those who don't belong in America.’
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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