Reclaiming Neoliberal Zones of Indifference: Exclusionary Borderscapes in Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on a cluster of interconnected perspectives, but relying mainly on critical cultural studies and border studies approaches, my article explores the complexities inherent to the challenge of representing the ‘borderization’ of the outer margins of Europe, and the increasing criminalization of migrants by institutions and the media that alternatively deploy images of the ‘drowned’ and the ‘saved’ in order to serve both compassionate, self-gratulatory agendas and populistic discourses of infection and invasion. Building on recent scholarship, such as, among others, Balibar (2009; 2015), Mezzadra et al. (2015), van Houtum (2010), and Mazzara (2015), I shall first analyze how migrants and the once (stereotypically) idyllic island of Lampedusa have been discursively re-constructed, across the European public sphere, as subjects and spaces of abjection, waste, expendability, and, according to the occasion, empathetic scopic consumption. Subsequently, I shall take as case study the short play Lampedusa , by the young British political activist and playwright Anders Lustgarten. Inspired by the relentless death toll at sea, and in particular by the appalling shipwreck of 3 October 2013 which reverberated across international headlines, inaugurating the discourse of “the Mediterranean-as-cemetery”, the play “is dedicated to the people who didn’t make it” (Lustgarten 2015: frontmatter), and overtly takes issue with Europe’s collective responsibility for the enduring tragedy of contemporary migration.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".