Border Crossing Assemblages: Differentiated Travelers and the Viapolitics of FlixBus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The critical border scholar William Walters argues that although vehicles of mobility (e.g. coaches, boats, and airplanes) are important features of mobility and migration, there is relatively little attention paid to the relation between materiality and migration. This research follows Walters’ notion of viapolitics to approach the bordering of mobility from the middle, from the perspective of the vehicle and not just the state, to gain a more theoretical and comprehensive understanding of human mobility and its entanglement with power-relations. Building upon assemblage theory, mobility studies, and contemporary border studies this research aims to lay bare the viapolitics of FlixBus. Drawing upon a mobile ethnography, that combines my own FlixBus travels with the analyses of policy documents and international agreements, I illustrate how FlixBus represents and reproduces scattered borderscapes. The analysis results in a concluding call for differentiated understanding of body/vehicle relations in order to understand better the bordering of mobility within the European Union.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.004 |
| 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 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".