Opening up the island: a ‘counter-islandness’ approach to migration in Malta.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is based on qualitative research undertaken since 2010 with African immigrants living in the small island state of Malta. Its purpose is to deconstruct a number of discourses and preconceptions about irregular migration, migrants and islandness. We argue that, in order to better understand the situation of migrants in Malta, we have to engage critically with conventional wisdom that depicts (usually small) islands as isolated, immobile and homogeneous spaces. Using a spatial approach, we propose the term ‘counter-islandness’ to describe a migration situation characterized by movement (versus immobility) and articulation of scales (versus isolation). We show how different scales in their complex and multiple interactions contribute to shaping and determining the future and trajectories of the ‘undesirables’. We explain how Malta has found itself at the heart of a complex circulatory system, articulating mobilities operating at various scales. We then categorise the role of the island within migratory patterns into three different forms: the island as barrier, hub, and place of settlement.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".