Palestinian, Arab, American, Muslim: “Looping Effects” of Categories and Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I reflect on the power and messiness of identity categories and their meaning. Inspired by the term “looping effects” of philosopher Ian Hacking, I discuss the intricate processes of looping and shifting meanings of categories within and between the realms of the public and the personal. I argue that the notion of looping can contribute to the way we think about the relationship between categories and those being categorized, or in Hacking’s words, the relationship between “names” and “the named.” Due to a wariness of the discursive and linguistic determinism of poststructuralist approaches, I intend to show the intricacy of the “subjective in-between” and the urgency of agency by focusing on one young woman’s unpredictable negotiation of various categories, such as Muslim, American, Palestinian, and Arab, categories placed on her by others as well as herself at different times and in different places. Drawing further on Hacking’s work, the paper also reflects on the ways we as scholars are “making-up” people through the use and promotion of certain categories, and how people categorized embrace and/or resist these in dynamic ways throughout different scales, from public and political spaces to the intimate scale of the personal.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".