Brand Aid and the International Political Economy and Sociology of North-South Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from international relations, international political economy, sociology, geography, and development studies to explore “Brand Aid”—a new concept in studies of North–South relations that can be advanced by IPE/IPS scholarship. In Brand Aid, branded products are sold to “ethical” consumer/citizens through celebrities who link them to worthy causes in developing countries. Brand Aid is “aid to brands” because it helps sell products and improve a brand's ethical profile and value. It is also “brands that provide aid” because a proportion of the profit or sales is devoted to helping “distant others.” Brand Aid reconfigures images and representations of the legitimate role of business, civil society, and the state (and their overlaps) in North–South relations in ways that are not easily situated between “exploitation” and “development.” The contributions collected here stem from a series of roundtables organized in 2011 (including one at the International Studies Association annual convention in Montreal) to discuss how “we” in the North engage to “help” people in the South beyond the traditional international aid and trade channels (see contribution by Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte). The roundtable discussions developed into examinations of the broader aspects of contemporary North–South relations around gender and security, the morality of health, the changing role of the global South, corporate practices and social responsibility, biopolitics, celebrities as global social actors, and mediating material cultures across distance. These areas could be usefully informed by contemporary IPE/IPS scholarship, but are not yet part of mainstream debates.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".