Opening up the island: a ‘counter-islandness’ approach to migration in Malta.
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 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.
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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.002 | 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