Re: Reading Ashley Smith: Critically Unpacking Government by Discursive Figures of Ashley as Girl Produced in the Smith Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I explore how Ashley Smith has become socially understood as a "case."I perform a critical discourse analysis of figures of Ashley Smith as technologies of governance.I argue that the Smith case ought not to be read as a case of anomalous system failure but as an extreme, but foreseeable, result of the routine and everyday brutality of a society and bureaucracies' necropolitical security apparatus.I map a chronological trajectory in which the "official story" of Inmate Smith gives way through the process of celebritization and sacralization of "Child Ashley" to a widely accepted understanding of Ashley Smith as a mislocated mental health subject: "Patient Smith."This analysis reveals that seeming progressive turn to understanding her as a victim of a failed system of mental health leaves intact, and even reinforces, logics and systems of gender, security, risk, race thinking and exclusion that make her death and the death of other prisoners predictable.I demonstrate how the logics of risk, mental health and legal discourses in the juridical field intersected with discourses of the girl in ways that made alternative readings and Ashley Smith's own narration of her story illegible and unwritable.Further, I argue that certain operating logics predetermine the labeling of properly constituted adolescent girls' noncompliance as madness and adolescent boys' noncompliance as criminality.This analysis further calls into question the foundations of the statistical discrepancy between criminal charge rates for adolescent boys and girls.This dissertation seeks to intervene in these intersecting governmental logics that write "girls in trouble with the law" in particularly damaging ways.I dedicate this dissertation to the ghosts who were with me as I wrote it.First, to my much missed friend Deb Shelly because, and she would smile to read this, friendship is magic.She was my longtime colleague in the law, friend in life, and partner in what she called "intellectual fierceness".Had she not passed away while I was writing this dissertation, Deb
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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 | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".