Photography and Diaspora: A roundtable with Pok Chi Lau, Surendra Lawoti, and Wei Leng Tay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The classic features of diaspora are a history of dispersion among a people (whether forced or voluntary); a strong sense of a homeland from which those people have been dispersed; a desire to return to a place of origin (however fantastical, impractical, or impossible that wish might be); and a lack of full assimilation in a host country. In today’s world, in which the coming and going of peoples is extraordinarily fluid, in which “home” can be fractured or multiple, and in which, in a few countries, including those in the throes of postcolonialism, the goal of assimilation competes with the recognition (occasionally the celebration) of cultural difference, is diaspora still useful as a description? Does it help us to understand contemporary photographic practices that pursue the experiences and longings of a migrated people? Following is a brief roundtable among three photographers who address these and other questions. In a sense, the photographers’ own movements reflect aspects of diaspora. Each was born in one country, moved to another, and return frequently to photograph the peoples and lands of their birth. They interpret their practices extraordinarily differently from one another, however, and use their cameras to different purposes and effects. In their hands, the features we associate with diaspora are often put into relationship with other ways of describing the movements of people, the forces of “home,” and the dynamics of assimilation. Pok Chi Lau was born in Hong Kong and now lives in the United States; Surendra Lawoti was born in Nepal and now lives in Canada; and Wei Leng Tay was born in Singapore and now lives in Hong Kong. Our conversation moved fluidly between the photographers as themselves diasporic and their interest in people who might be said to belong to a diaspora.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
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".