Virtual borders, data aliens, and bare bodies: Culture, securitization, and the biometric state
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the reconfiguration of state power into new immaterial forms such as virtual and biometric borders, and the impact of this reconfiguration in the cultural representation of migrant subjects and transborder communities. It attempts to respond to, and to elucidate what happens when security mutates from an abstract notion to a series of practices that become part of the nationstate's dominant discourse. In the first section, it offers a panoramic vision of virtual borders and its explanatory mechanisms linked to security and biometrics. Drawing from what Muller (2008) calls the ‘dispositif of security,’ it then discusses some interconnections between the biometric state, the culture of securitization and the growing perception that borders are becoming quasi‐permanent states of exception. The third part establishes connecting lines between visual securitization images and other recent representations of the biometric border in popular film and narrative using a detailed discussion of the film Sleep Dealer (2008) as a primary example of these interconnections.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".