Representations of Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary Refugee Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contemporary discourse surrounding the nation state, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants alike have increasingly and frequently been referred to as stateless people, whose lack of citizenship rights prevents them from participating in social, political, and cultural life. Stripped of their political rights to citizenship, this often puts them in an acute state of poverty and precarity. Using Judith Butler’s reflections on cohabitation and ethical obligation, this paper will engage with the topic of poverty and precarity through a selection of non-fictional texts that address flight, refugeeism, immigration, and limited access to a decent life, agency, and self-representation. Specifically, the paper will focus on Gulwali Passarlay’s The Lightless Sky (2015) and the story collection Breach (2016), consisting of stories re-written by Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes. More precisely, the paper will draw attention to the on-going current debates related to the so-called “refugee crisis” by focussing on forced migration, imprisonment, suffering, hunger, life in camps, and dangerous illegal journeys to safety. Since the narratives generally make the point that globalisation has shattered the illusion of home, I will read refugee precarity as a paradoxical condition that, on the one hand, shows the severe shortcomings of socio-cultural exclusion, and, on the other hand, contributes to the questioning and/or redefining of transnational political space and actively calls for a politics of intervention.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".