“War-on-Terror” Frames of Remembrance: The 1985 Air India Bombings After 9/11
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 critically analyzes Canadian filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson’s documentary Air India 182 in light of recent official efforts to remember and redress the 1985 Air India bombings. The author argues that the film, in line with official efforts, constructs a narrative of the bombings through a “war on terror” framing of remembrance that is at once specific to the recircuitries of race produced in the anxious aftermath of 9/11, and consistent with historically rooted operations of xenophobia and colonial power. The significance of such a framing is that it works not only to shape memory of the bombings as a certain kind of event (one with unambiguous perpetrators, victims and damages), it narrows the field of what are imagined as possible actions toward redressing or compensating for its losses. In other words, a war-on-terror framing of remembrance, as a discursive strategy or approach to “remembering” the bombings, limits the potential for a complex understanding of the politics out of which this event arose, restricting public debate over the kinds of responses that continue to be generated in its aftermath. Moreover, a war-on-terror framing of remembrance is understood here to employ neoliberal and settler-colonialist discourses of productive futurity and multicultural tolerance to make remembrance of the bombings concomitant with the construction of turbaned Sikhs and other racially and religiously minoritized citizens as “dangerous internal foreigners.” As such, this paper bears implications beyond the documentary film, including the consequences of neoliberalism for the formation of public memory and for the making of race and nation in Canada.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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