THE IDEA OF EMANCIPATION AFTER POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
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
Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, this essay argues the traditions of “history from below”, subaltern studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory’s capacity to diagnose domination and ties theory too closely to the self-understandings of its subjects. Distinguishing appropriately between agency and freedom and between desire and interests can revivify the idea of emancipation. A universal interest in freedom from domination can be defended on this basis without discounting the self-understandings and actual desires of people. This argument points the way to a division of labour between emancipatory political theory, which analyses public institutions in the name of the universal interest in freedom, and emancipatory politics, which begins from people’s actual desires in order to build support for institutional change.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 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