Poached lives, traded forms: Engaging with animal trafficking around the globe
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
From the depths of the Borneo jungle to private ménageries through the dark web, this article investigates the expansion of contemporary wildlife trafficking and maps an early twenty-first-century booming trade in living organisms, dead animal parts and metempsychic imaginaries. Fuelled by a multiplicity of emergent relational entanglements, such traffic involves life and death matters, big money interests, coveted commercial routes (and their extensive influence over land, people and spirits) as well as deep affective states infused with apocalyptic narratives, blood and bullets, tourism and terrorism. Here I concentrate on the curious case of pangolin poaching and identify problems pertaining to the characterization of life forms when such forms are massively poached, extensively traded and, overall, continuously transfigured along various registers of activities. Concomitantly, I detect in today’s so-called ‘multispecies-turn’ a problematic conceptualization of what an animal (individual or species) is – be this animal alive or dead, whether it should be hunted, protected, consumed, reproduced, mourned, or even held responsible for a new geological epoch. Rather than assuming the given of an already individuated form (from which to consider either pre-conceived or post-confirmed developmental stages), I draw on individuating processes that actually enable individuals to emerge (and emergence to individuate). While distinguishing between dynamics of concrescence and indetermination, I offer positive, operative and alternative concepts to re-engage with mo(ve)ment of shared becomings. Here, the animal is approached as an event.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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