Subsoil abundance and surface absence: a junior mining company and its performance of prognosis in northwestern Ecuador
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
Spectacle and performance have long characterized global mining investment. In this paper, I examine the performative strategies of a junior mining company called Ascendant Copper in its pursuit of copper in northwestern Ecuador in the mid‐2000s. I focus on Ascendant's contradictory efforts to attract mining investment with imagery of subsoil abundance while also downplaying the scale and significance of mining in the face of local opposition. I approach the company's divergent strategies as reflective of the dual meanings of prognosis, as both forecast and diagnosis. I begin by examining the means through which Ascendant promoted subsoil copper wealth within the framework of resource classification established by the Toronto Stock Exchange. I then analyse the way the company employed discourses of corporate social responsibility to portray its local presence as one defined by conservation and development. In analysing the articulation of a junior company like Ascendant in relation to both subsoil and surface, I not only highlight the materiality of corporate social responsibility, but also underscore the precarious becoming of junior companies, who seldom feature in anthropological accounts of corporations.
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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